Voyagers II - The Alien Within Page 4

  Healy’s face went white, as if Jo had slapped him. Dumbly he pushed himself out of his chair. Richards got to his feet beside him.

  Jo let them get as far as her door before calling, “Dr. Richards, I almost forgot. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Stoner. Could you come back here a moment, please?”

  Richards turned back toward her. Healy hesitated, then opened the door and stepped out.

  Jo indicated the chair nearest her own.

  Sitting in it, Richards said, “If he wasn’t your enemy before we came in here, he certainly is now.”

  Raising an eyebrow at him, Jo asked, “You think so? I’m not sure he has the guts.”

  The psychiatrist shrugged. “You emasculated him.”

  She laughed. “And you’re assuming he had some balls when he came in here.”

  Richards smiled and ran a finger across his mustache.

  “What do you make of Stoner’s not sleeping?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be affecting him physically. Of course, I never saw him before he was frozen, so it’s a little difficult for me to say.” His eyes shifted away from her.

  Jo said, “What else?”

  “I’m not sure what to make of it,” the psychiatrist said. “He had a hallucinatory session yesterday. It was brief, but for a minute or so he was totally out of reality.”

  Jo felt her breath catch in her throat.

  “It may be just the lack of sleep catching up with him. But there’s a definite problem, and until we know what it is and what’s causing it…”

  “What does he do all night?”

  “He reads. He sits around his room and reads everything that I give him. He’s devoured half the books in my library—in less than a week.”

  “You’re not giving him books about recent history or current affairs, are you?” Jo asked.

  “No. I still think that he has to be introduced to the modern world gradually. But he’s certainly catching up on the classics! He’s like a student doing all his required reading for English lit. High school and college, all at once.”

  “What does he say about his not sleeping?”

  Richards grimaced good-naturedly. “I asked him about it, and he said he’d been sleeping for eighteen years so he didn’t feel the need for sleep now.”

  Jo nodded. “That sounds like him. He’s good at covering himself.”

  “There’s something more.”

  “What?”

  “He’s shown no interest in sex. Doesn’t mention it at all. No nocturnal emissions. He doesn’t even seem to pay any attention to the women who’ve been on the monitoring team. And there are a couple of very pretty ones. No come-ons, no joking with them, no preening for them.”

  Jo fell silent. As driven as Keith had been in his earlier life, he had still found time for sex. Not love, perhaps, but in bed he could unloose all the fiery passion that he had held in check through his tight-lipped, tension-filled days.

  Richards asked, “You two were…close, weren’t you?”

  “We were lovers, for a short while.” An image of herself as a star-struck student madly in love with the moody, brooding scientist-astronaut almost made Jo blush. What a fool, she scolded herself. What a fool!

  “You were with him during the project to make contact with the alien spacecraft?”

  “Yes, at Kwajalein. And I went with him to Tyuratam.”

  “And he flew off to rendezvous with the spacecraft and didn’t come back.”

  “He chose not to come back,” Jo said, her mind filling with the memory of it. “He chose to let himself freeze in the spacecraft with the dead alien’s body instead of returning safely to Earth.”

  Richards said nothing, and Jo finally realized that he was asking the questions, not she.

  She smiled at him. “Your first name is Gene, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He smiled back.

  “You realize that we’re going to have to move him from here. Too many prying eyes—and blabbing mouths.”

  “I was wondering if you would come to that conclusion.”

  “Will you go with him, Gene?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “I need you to,” Jo said urgently. “Gene, I need your loyalty. I need a man I can trust.”

  “You can trust me,” he said.

  She leaned forward and put her hand on his bare arm. “Can I, Gene? Not as employer and employee, but as friends? I need a friend. Desperately.”

  “Your husband…”

  “We don’t see eye to eye on this. For the first time since I’ve known him, he’s opposing me. Not openly. Not yet. But I don’t think I can count on him, not on this project.”

  Richards said nothing. Jo pulled her hand away.

  He reached out to take it in his. “You have a reputation, you know.”

  With a grin, she admitted, “I suppose I do.”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble with the chairman of the board.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m still a married man.”

  “I’ve seen your file. You’ve been separated for six months now. Divorce proceedings started last week.”

  Richards gazed at her for a long, silent moment. Jo could see the mental calculations going on behind his bright brown eyes.

  “Where will you take him?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I haven’t decided yet. I have a house in Maine that’s pretty secluded. Perhaps there.” It was a deliberate ploy. If her people in Maine discovered a sudden new surveillance of the house in the next few days, she would know that Richards could not be trusted.

  The psychiatrist let go of her hand. “I’ll go with him, wherever it is,” he said. “He’s my patient, after all. And—I’d like to be your friend.”

  Jo smiled at him. “Thank you, Gene. You won’t regret it.”

  “I’m going strictly on a professional basis, as Stoner’s doctor. Any personal relationship between you and me…well, let’s just allow nature to take its own course, shall we?”

  “Go with the flow,” Jo agreed, thinking silently, He’s enough of a male to want to think that he’ll pick the time and place. The male ego! How wonderfully predictable!

  “And what happens to Healy?” Richards asked.

  Jo looked into the psychiatrist’s eyes, wondering, Is he asking out of loyalty or out of ambition? Is he trying to show me that he’s loyal to Healy or that he wants the chief scientist’s job?

  “He’ll stay here,” she answered. “He’s a competent administrator, even though I can’t trust him with anything really sensitive.”

  “I see.” Richards tugged at his mustache for a moment, then, “Can I ask you one more question? It’s personal.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Stoner has barely mentioned you, and he hasn’t shown any burning desire to see you.”

  Jo felt ice chilling her blood. “I know that.”

  “Yes. But you haven’t asked to see him, either. Why not?”

  “I see the videotapes.”

  “But you haven’t tried to meet him.”

  “Would you allow it?”

  “I think he could handle it. It might even help to bring whatever he’s suppressing up to the surface. But can you handle it?”

  She finally saw the point he was driving toward. “You mean because we were lovers once, do I still have a feeling about him?”

  Richards nodded.

  “That was eighteen years ago,” Jo said. “I was a kid, a student, and he was a very handsome, very glamorous, very important man.”

  “But you were in love with him then, weren’t you?”

  She hesitated, wondering what she should say. Then, “Frankly, I was using him to get ahead in what was then a highly male-dominated field. He wasn’t very deeply attached to me, and I certainly wasn’t madly in love with him.”

  It was a lie, and she thought she could see in Richards’s eyes that he didn’t believe her.

  But he s
aid, “I see.”

  They both let it go at that.

  CHAPTER 7

  The new Director of Corporate Public Relations for Vanguard Industries was An Linh Laguerre. To her, the frozen astronaut was more than a news story, more than a company project. It was a personal quest.

  She had been born twenty-eight years earlier in a refugee camp in Thailand, a few miles from the border of Kampuchea, where Vietnamese troops and hard-eyed Communist administrators were turning the former Cambodia into an unwilling, starving colony of Vietnam. Millions had been killed in the years of fighting and massacres, and millions more had been driven from their homes, struggling desperately over shattered highways and tortuous jungle trails toward the relative safety of independent Thailand.

  Relative safety. The camps were bursting with refugees, sick, wounded, dying. Their rickety, makeshift cabins and improvised tents overflowed with the tide of human misery. Rats fought human beings for scraps of food and often won. People died of simple infections, their bodies too malnourished to fight off the fevers that swept through the pitiful, ragged refugees.

  In the torrid sun and paralyzing humidity of the jungle, amid the squalor and filth, the buzzing flies, the loud voices arguing over a cup of rice, the screams of a woman dying even as she gave birth—in such a camp was An Linh born. Her mother died of malnutrition and exhaustion before the sun set on her first day. A young French Red Cross worker, a harried, overworked volunteer, took that one baby out of the hundreds that she had seen orphaned at the camp, because the infant girl looked so pretty to her. Her husband, a surgeon who never volunteered for refugee work again after putting in three months at the camps, reluctantly allowed his wife to bring the baby home to Avignon with them. Eventually they adopted the girl, when it became clear that they could not have babies of their own. But he never allowed her to use his family name. He gave her an invented surname—Laguerre, the child of war.

  An Linh’s earliest memories were of Avignon, the medieval stone city with the bridge that had collapsed centuries ago and had never been rebuilt; it still went only halfway across the peaceful Rhone River. She spent many an afternoon at the crumbling edge of the old bridge, in the shadows of the chapel built upon it, straining her eyes to study the farther bank of the river. To her child’s understanding, the other side of the river was her other life. Her Asian mother was there, she imagined.

  She saw her French father as cold, aloof, unbending. As she grew older she realized that he treated her with formal propriety but never regarded her as his daughter. Slowly, An Linh began to understand that he had allowed her into his home because of his wife, An Linh’s French mother. He loved the woman and could deny her nothing that was in his power to give. He simply did not have the power to love a child who was not his own.

  But as distant as her adopted father was, her French mother was warm and close. To An Linh, she was the woman Monet painted, the mother who personified love and safety and happiness, the slim lady smiling tenderly in the afternoon sunshine of summer. She was Canadian by birth, a Quebecoise who had fled from the convent in which her parents had enrolled her and spent her life atoning for the guilt she felt at abandoning God. She had met the man she would marry, the proud, handsome son of a wealthy vintner, while she was at nursing school in Aix-en-Provence and he was an intern. They honeymooned in Paris while she talked him into volunteer work in Indochina.

  To be a beautiful Oriental child growing up in Avignon was not without pain. When An Linh started school, the French children called her Arabe or Africaine. The Algerian and Moroccan children called her Chinoise.

  She was ten years old when the American astronaut flew out to meet the approaching alien spacecraft and somehow stayed aboard it instead of returning home with his Russian cosmonaut pilot. An Linh watched the rocket’s takeoff on television, but within a few days the story disappeared from view, just as the American himself drifted farther and farther away from Earth on the alien’s retreating ship.

  As An Linh grew into her teen years and began to menstruate, she suddenly saw her adopted father in a different way. He was a man, and she realized that now he was watching her as a man watches a woman. She was terrified, and all the more so because she could not bring herself to tell her French mother about this shocking secret.

  She realized also that her mother was aging. While her father grew more handsome and distinguished with each year, her mother was visibly fading. Her golden-brown hair was turning dull, mousey. The sparkle in her eyes dimmed. She seemed tired, slow, withdrawn.

  They sent her to the university at Aix, where An Linh studied journalism and quickly learned that sex was the greatest equalizer in the world. Among the students she was no longer the stranger, the outsider, the alien creature who did not belong. Even her nickname of La Chinoise became a term of admiration instead of mockery. She traded boyfriends with the other girls, eager to make them like her. She did well in her classes, so well that she could afford to avoid the male faculty members who pursued her.

  By the end of her first year, as she rode the bus back toward Avignon, through the gentle hills dotted with nuclear power plants and neatly planted vineyards, she thought that she could at last face her adopted father as an adult, an equal, no longer afraid of the unspoken emotions that surged between them.

  Her father was dead. He had been killed that very afternoon in an auto accident, senselessly, as he drove to meet her at the bus station. An Linh’s mother collapsed. She had to take charge of the funeral arrangements herself, while her mother was taken to the same hospital where her father had worked.

  There they found the cancer that was eating away at her body. And there they began the years of desperate therapies to save her life. Chemicals, radiation, lasers, heat, ice, diet—the doctors tried them all. To An Linh it seemed as though the woman she had known as a mother had been transformed into a haggard, passive, weak, and helpless experimental animal, melting away, visibly shrinking with each passing day. But deep within the woman’s body, too deeply enmeshed with her vital organs for surgery or even X-ray laser beams to reach, cancerous tumors were growing. The body that could not conceive a baby created its own grotesque parody of life, cancer cells that multiplied endlessly. Like soldiers facing hopeless odds, the doctors slaughtered the enemy cells ruthlessly. But each tumor they killed gave rise to other tumors.

  Her mother was dying. The chief internist of the hospital put it as gently as he could, but in the end he told An Linh that there was nothing more they could do except try to make the final days as painless as possible.

  “But all the new medicines that have been discovered,” she said, feeling a wild anger taking control of her. “The genetic techniques that have been developed…”

  “Useless,” said the physician. “We have tried everything.”

  Fighting down the fury that was making her heart pound so hard she could feel it in her chest, An Linh said, “Then freeze her.”

  The man’s silver brows rose several millimeters.

  “I want her frozen, like that astronaut was, years ago.”

  The chief internist’s office was spacious and impeccably neat. He was not a man who tolerated slovenliness, not even sloppy thinking.

  “But my dear child,” he said softly, “that would be pointless. And quite expensive.”

  “I want her frozen as soon as she is pronounced clinically dead.” An Linh had studied the possibilities for a school assignment. “I will sign the necessary releases.”

  “No one has ever been successfully revived after cryonic immersion. Neuromuscular function…the cytoplasm…” The physician was falling back on jargon in an unconscious effort to intimidate this willful, utterly beautiful but determined young lady.

  “As long as she remains frozen there is always the hope that one day she can be revived and cured.”

  The internist shook his head sadly. “The cost…”

  “I will pay,” An Linh said flatly.

  And she did. Her university days
were finished. She applied the small legacy her adopted father had left to her mother’s maintenance, then headed for Paris and took a job as a television news researcher. Within a year she had reached the bed of the company’s chief executive and wangled an assignment to Indochina. She gained brief worldwide fame for her poignant, passionate story of her homecoming to that troubled part of the world and how it was finally taking the first timid, tentative steps toward peace and human kindness.

  The Indochina story got her an offer from a Canadian news agency. An Linh accepted, partly because the pay was very good, partly because it got her away from the executive in Paris, mainly because it brought her closer to the United States, where the frozen astronaut was hidden away by the corporation that had rescued his body and returned it to Earth. After a year in Quebec, though, she longed for a warmer climate. And she had heard persistent rumors that the frozen astronaut was in a laboratory somewhere in the Hawaiian Islands.

  She was too dedicated and too photogenic not to be noticed by the major news corporations. The offers started flooding in after only a few months of her being on-camera in Quebec. She stubbornly refused them all and set herself the task of getting to the frozen astronaut. It was not difficult for her to gain a job in the public relations department of Vanguard Industries’ aircraft manufacturing division in California. The woman heading the personnel department there said she was overqualified, but the male division manager took one look at her and, grinning, hired her on the spot.

  Within six months she met Archie Madigan. She had been able to fend off the division manager, but to get herself promoted to corporate public relations, she went to bed with the smiling, seemingly sensitive lawyer. Once she started working in Hilo, she made certain that the chairman of the board noticed her. Nillson made no sexual advances, but An Linh rose rapidly to become director of corporate public relations.

  It was in her sparkling new office that she met Cliff Baker of Worldnews, Inc. And he introduced her to Father Lemoyne.

  Baker was the complete cynic, a journalist who believed in no one and nothing except himself and his own talents. He was nearly ten years older than An Linh, a ruggedly handsome Australian with golden-blond hair and a lean, muscular body. He could have been a video deity, except for the broken nose that marred his otherwise perfect face. His smile was irresistible, his sky-blue eyes disarming. For the first time, An Linh fell helplessly in love. It was not the first time for Baker.