The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Read online

  Lee turned to Grote. “How about taking the skimmer out and stunning a couple of big fish and towing them back here to the shallows?”

  Grinning, Grote replied, “Hardly fair sport with the equipment I’ve got.” He turned and headed for the car.

  “Wait,” Stek called to him. “Give me a chance to get this safely packed in a magnetic casing.” And the physicist took the instrument off toward the skimmer.

  “Sid,” Pascual said gently, “I want you to come back with us. You need a thorough medical check.”

  “Medical?” Lee flashed. “Or are you fronting for Lehman?”

  Pascual’s eyes widened with surprise. “If you had a mirror, you would see why I want to check you. You’re breaking out in skin cancers.”

  Instinctively, Lee looked at his hands and forearms. There were a few tiny blisters on them. And more on his belly and legs.

  “It’s from overexposure to the ultraviolet. Hatfield’s skin-darkening didn’t fully protect you.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “I can’t tell without a full examination.”

  Just like a doctor. “I can’t leave now,” Lee said. “I’ve got to be here when they wake up and make sure that they don’t suspect they’ve been visited by the . . . by us.”

  “And if they do suspect?”

  Lee shrugged. “That’s something we ought to know, even if we can’t do anything about it.”

  “Won’t it be dangerous for you?”

  “Maybe.”

  Pascual shook his head. “You mustn’t stay out in the open any longer. I won’t be responsible for it.”

  “Fine. Do you want me to sign a release form?”

  Grote brought the skimmer back around sundown, with two good-size fish aboard. The others got aboard around midnight, and with a few final radioed words of parting, they drove off the beach and out to sea.

  At dawn the people woke up. They looked and acted completely normally, as far as Lee could tell. It was one of the children who noticed the still sluggish fish that Grote had left in a shallow pool just outside the line of breakers. Every man in the clan splashed out, spear in hand, to get them. They feasted happily that day.

  The dream was confusing. Somehow the towers on Titan and the exploding star got mixed together. Lee saw himself driving a bone spear into the sleeping form of one of the natives. The man turned on the ground, with the spear run through his body, and smiled bloodily at him. It was Ardraka.

  “Sid!”

  He snapped awake. It was dark, and the people were sleeping, full-bellied. He was slouched near one of the entryways to the main sleeping cave, at the mouth of a tunnel leading to the openings in the cliff wall.

  “Sid, can you hear me?’

  “Yes,” he whispered so low that he could only feel the vibration in his throat.

  “I’m up the beach about three kilometers from the relay unit. You’ve got to come back to the ship. Stek thinks he’s figured out the instrument.”

  Wordlessly, silently, Lee got up and padded through the tunnel and out onto the beach. The night was clear and bright. Dawn would be coming in another hour, he judged. The sea was calm, the wind a gentle crooning as it swept down from the cliffs.

  “Sid, did you hear what I said? Stek thinks he knows what the instrument is for. It’s part of a pointing system for a communications setup.”

  “I’m on my way.” He still whispered and turned to see if anyone was following him.

  Grote was in a biosuit, and no one else was aboard the skimmer. The engineer jabbered about Stek’s work on the instrument all the way back to the ship.

  Just before they arrived, Grote suggested, “Uh, Sid, you do want to put on some coveralls, don’t you?”

  Two biosuited men were setting up some electronics equipment at the base of the ship’s largest telescopes, dangling in a hoist sling overhead, the fierce glow of Sirius glinting off its metal barrel.

  “Stek’s setting up an experiment,” Grote explained. Lee was bundled into a biosuit and ushered into the physicist’s workroom as soon as he set foot inside the ship. Stek was a large, round, florid man with thinning red hair. Lee had hardly spoken to him at all, except for the few hours at the cave, when the physicist had been encased in a powersuit.

  “It’s a tracker, built to find a star in the sky and lock onto it as long as it’s above the horizon,” Stek said, gesturing to the instrument hovering in a magnetic grapple a few inches above his work table.

  “You’re sure of that?” Lee asked.

  The physicist glanced at him as though he had been insulted. “There’s no doubt about it. It’s a tracker, and it probably was used to aim a communication antenna at their home star.”

  “And where is that?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m setting up the experiment with the telescope.”

  Lee walked over to the work table and stared at the instrument. “How can you be certain that it’s what you say it is?”

  Stek flushed, then controlled himself. With obvious patience, he explained, “X-ray probes showed that the instrument contained a magnetic memory tape. The tape was in binary code, and it was fairly simple to transliterate the code, electronically, into the ship’s main computers. We didn’t even have to touch the instrument physically except with electrons.”

  Lee made an expression that showed he was duly impressed.

  Looking happier, Stek went on, “The computer cross-checked the instrument’s coding and came up with correlations: attitude references were on the instrument’s tape, and astronomical ephemerides, timing data and so forth. Exactly what we’d put into a communications tracker.”

  “But this was made by a different race of people—”

  “It makes no difference,” Stek said sharply. “The physics are the same. The universe is the same. The instrument can only do the job it was designed to do, and that job was to track a single star.”

  “Only one star?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m certain it was for communicating with their home star.”

  “So we can find their home star after all.” Lee felt the old dread returning, but with it something new, something deeper. Those people in the caves were our enemy. And maybe their brothers, the ones who built the machines on Titan, are still out there somewhere looking for them—and for us.

  * XI *

  Lee ate back at the Sirius globe, but Pascual insisted on his remaining in a biosuit until they had thoroughly checked him out. And they wouldn’t let him eat Earth food, although there was as much local food as he wanted. He didn’t want much.

  “You’ve thinned out too much,” Marlene said. She was sitting next to him at the galley table.

  “Ever see a fat Sirian?” He meant it as a joke; it came out waspish. Marlene dropped the subject.

  The whole ship’s company gathered around the telescope and the viewscreen that would show an amplified picture of the telescope’s field of view. Stek bustled around, making last-minute checks and adjustments of the equipment. Rasmussen stood taller than everyone else, looking alternately worried and excited. Everyone, including Lee, was in a biosuit.

  Lehman showed up at Lee’s elbow. “Do you think it will work?”

  “Driving the telescope from the ship’s computer’s version of the instrument’s tape? Stek seems to think it’ll go all right.”

  “And you?”

  Lee shrugged. “The people in the caves told me what I wanted to know. Now this instrument will tell us where they came from originally.”

  “The home world of our ancient enemies?”

  “Yes.”

  For once, Lehman didn’t seem to be amused. “And what happens then?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe we go out and see if they are still there. Maybe we re-open the war.”

  “If there was a war.”

  “There was. It might still be going on, for all we know. Maybe we’re just a small part of it, a skirmish.”

  “A skirmish that
wiped out the life on this planet,” Lehman said.

  “And also wiped out Earth, too.”

  “But what about the people on this planet, Sid? What about the people in the caves?”

  Lee couldn’t answer.

  “Do we let them die out, just because they might have been our enemies a few millennia ago?”

  “They would still be our enemies, if they knew who we are,” Lee said tightly.

  “So we let them die?”

  Lee tried to blot their faces out of his mind, to erase the memory of Ardraka and the children and Ardra apologizing shamefully and the people fishing in the morning . . .

  “No,” he heard himself say. “We’ve got to help them. They can’t hurt us anymore, and we ought to help them.”

  Now Lehman smiled.

  “It’s ready,” Stek said, his voice pitched high with excitement.

  Sitting at the desk-size console that stood beside the telescope, he thumbed the power switch and punched a series of buttons.

  The viewscreen atop the desk glowed into life, and a swarm of stars appeared. With a low hum of power, the telescope slowly turned, to the left. The scene in the viewscreen shifted. Beside the screen was a smaller display, an astronomical map with a bright luminous dot showing where the telescope was aiming.

  The telescope stopped turning, hesitated, edged slightly more to the left and then made a final, barely discernible correction upward.

  “It’s locked on.”

  The viewscreen showed a meager field of stars, with a single bright pinpoint centered exactly in the middle of the screen.

  “What is it, what star?”

  Lee pushed forward, through the crowd that clustered around the console.

  “My God,” Stek said, his voice sounding hollow. “That’s . . . that’s the sun.”

  Lee felt his knees wobble. “They’re from Earth!”

  “It can’t be,” someone said.

  Lee shoved past the people in front of him and stared at the map. The bright dot was fixed on the sun’s location.

  “They’re from Earth!” he shouted. “They’re part of us!”

  “But how could . . .”

  “They were a colony of ours,” Lee realized. “The Others were an enemy . . . an enemy that nearly wiped them out and smashed Earth’s civilization back into a stone age. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, but Ardraka’s people did not. And we didn’t destroy the people here . . . we’re the same people!”

  “But that’s—”

  “How can you he sure?”

  “He is right,” Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling above the other voices. They all stopped to hear him. “There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous.”

  Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. “Nick, we’ve got work to do! We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to introduce them to fire and metals and cereal grains—”

  Charnovsky laughed. “Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate.”

  “No,” Lee said, realizing where he belonged. “Tonight I go back to them.”

  “Go back?” Marlene asked.

  “Tonight I go back with a gift,” Lee went on. “A gift from my people to Ardraka’s. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That’s a gift they’ll be able to understand and use.”

  Lehman said, “You still don’t know who built the machinery on Titan.’

  “We’ll find out one of these days.”

  Rasmussen broke in, “You realize that we will have to return Earthward before the next expedition could possibly get anywhere near here.”

  “Some of us can wait here for the next expedition. I will, anyway.”

  The captain nodded and a slow grin spread across his face. “I knew you would even before we found out that your friends are really our brothers.”

  Lee looked around for Grote. “Come on, Jerry. Let’s get moving. I want to see Ardraka’s face when he sees the boat.”

  OLD TIMER’S GAME

  Modern sports—professional and amateur—have had headaches dealing with performance enhancing drugs.

  But they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

  * * *

  “He’s making a travesty of the game!”

  White-haired Alistair Bragg was quivering with righteous wrath as he leveled a trembling finger at Vic Caruso. I felt sorry for Vic despite his huge size, or maybe because of it. He was sitting all alone up there before the panel of judges. I thought of Gulliver, giant-sized compared to the puny little Lilliputians. But tied hand and foot, helpless.

  This hearing was a reporter’s dream, the kind of newsmaking opportunity that comes along maybe once in a decade. Or less.

  I sat at the news media table, elbow to elbow with the big, popular TV commentators and slick-haired pundits. The guys who talk like they know everything about baseball, while all they really know is what working stiffs like me put up on their teleprompters.

  Old man Bragg was a shrimp, but a powerful figure in the baseball world. He owned the Cleveland Indians, who’d won the American League pennant, but then lost the World Series to the Dodgers in four straight.

  Bragg wore a dark gray business suit and a bright red tie. To the unsophisticated eye he looked a little like an overweight one of Santa’s elves: short, round, his face a little bloated. But whereas an elf would be cheerful and dancing-eyed, Bragg radiated barely-concealed fury.

  “He’s turning baseball into a freak show!” Bragg accused, still jabbing his finger in Caruso’s direction. “A freak show!”

  Vic Caruso had been the first-string catcher for the Oakland Athletics, one of the best damn hitters in the league, and a solid rock behind the plate with a cannon for an arm. But now he looked like an oversized boy, kind of confused by all the fuss that was being made about him. He was wearing a tan sports jacket and a white shirt with a loosely-knotted green tie that seemed six inches too short. In fact, his shirt, jacket, and brown slacks all appeared too small to contain his massive frame; it looked as if he would burst out of his clothes any minute.

  Aside from his ill-fitting ensemble, Vic didn’t look like a freak. He was a big man, true enough, tall and broad in the shoulders. His face was far from handsome: his nose was larger than it should have been, and the corners of his innocent blue eyes were crinkled from long years on sunny baseball diamonds.

  He looked hurt, betrayed, as if he were the injured party instead of the accused.

  The hearing wasn’t a trial, exactly. The three solemn-faced men sitting behind the long table up in the front of the room weren’t really judges. They were the commissioner of baseball and the heads of the National and American Leagues, about as much baseball brass (and ego) as you could fit into one room.

  The issue before them would determine the future of America’s Pastime.

  Bragg had worked himself into a fine, red-faced fury. He had opposed every change in the game he’d ever heard of, always complaining that any change in baseball would make a travesty of the game. If he had his way, there’d be no interleague play, no designated hitter, no night baseball, and no player’s union. Especially that last one. The word around the ballyard was that Bragg bled blood for every nickel he had to pay his players.

  “It started with steroids, back in the Nineties,” he said, ostensibly to the commissioner and the two league presidents. But he was looking at the jampacked rows of onlookers, and us news reporters, and especially at the banks of television cameras that were focused on his perspiring face.

  “Steroids threatened to make a travesty of the game,” said Bragg, repeating his favorite phrase. “We moved heaven and earth to drive them out of the game. Suspended players who used ’em, expunged their records, prohibited them from entering the Hall of Fame.”

  Caruso shifted uncomfortably in his wooden chair, making it squeak and groan as if it might collapse beneath his weight.

  “Then they started using
protein enhancers, natural supplements that were undetectable by normal drug screenings. All of a sudden little shortstops from Nicaragua were hitting tape-measure home runs!”

  The commissioner, a grave-faced, white-haired man of great dignity, interrupted Bragg’s tirade. “We are all aware of the supplements. I believe attendance figures approximately doubled when batting averages climbed so steeply.”

  Undeterred, Bragg went on, “So the pitchers started taking stuff to prevent joint problems. No more rotator cuff injuries; no more Tommy John surgeries. When McGilmore went twenty-six and oh we—”

  “Wait a minute,” the National League president said. He was a round butterball, but his moon-shaped face somehow looked menacing because of the dark stubble across his jaw. Made him look like a Mafia enforcer. “Isn’t Tommy John surgery a form of artificial enhancement? The kind of thing you’re accusing Vic Caruso of?”

  Bragg shot back, “Surgery to correct an injury is one thing. Surgery and other treatments to turn a normal human body into a kind of superman—that’s unacceptable!”

  “But the fans seems to love it,” said the American League president, obviously thinking about the previous year’s record-breaking attendance figures.

  “I’m talking about protecting the purity of the game,” Bragg insisted. “If we don’t act now, we’ll wind up with a bunch of half-robot freaks on the field instead of human beings!”

  The Commissioner nodded. “We wouldn’t want that,” he said, looking directly at Caruso.

  “We’ve got to make an example of this . . . this . . . freak,” Bragg demanded. “Otherwise the game’s going to be warped beyond recognition!”

  The audience murmured. The cameras turned to Caruso, who looked uncomfortable, embarrassed, but not ashamed.

  The commissioner silenced the audience’s mutterings with a stern look.

  “I think we should hear Mr. Caruso’s story from his own lips,” he said. “After all, his career—his very livelihood—is at stake here.”

  “What’s at stake here,” Bragg countered, “is the future of Major League Baseball.”

  The commissioner nodded, but said, “Mr. Bragg, you are excused. Mr. Caruso, please take the witness chair.”