Voyagers II - The Alien Within Read online

  He casually mentioned the frozen astronaut to her, once she told him about her mother waiting in a cylinder filled with liquid nitrogen in Avignon. An Linh searched her office data banks for every shred of data about the astronaut: his past history, the details of how he flew aboard a Russian Soyuz to rendezvous with the alien spacecraft, his decision to remain aboard it with the dead alien, and finally the recapture of the spacecraft. Vanguard Industries had spent a considerable fortune to reach the alien vehicle; it was the farthest manned space mission in history. But once Vanguard’s team had brought the alien spacecraft back to an orbit around the Earth, an impenetrable blackout descended. The file stopped dead. Every attempt An Linh made to dig further was met by the computer screen displaying RESTRICTED INFORMATION, PER ORDER J. CAMERATA NILLSON, PRESIDENT, VANGUARD INDUSTRIES.

  An Linh soon realized that the marriage between Vanguard’s president and the chairman of the board was a strange one. She had a reputation for sleeping her way to the top and apparently did not care who knew about it. Nor did he, it seemed. Nillson’s own reputation was the subject of whispers and strange rumors that hinted at odd tastes but offered no real facts. An Linh kept her own amorous liaisons as quiet as possible, maintaining a delicate balance between discreetness and desirability. She owed a debt to Archie Madigan, but he seemed content to leave her alone. Perhaps he was waiting for the debt to accrue interest, An Linh thought.

  In a way, Jo Camerata Nillson became a role model for her, and she knew that sooner or later they would become deadly enemies, both seeking power through the same man: Everett Nillson.

  Then came the board meeting, and the revelation that the astronaut had been successfully revived. An Linh’s heart pounded inside her; she could see her mother being revived, recovering, returning to life.

  That evening she told Baker. She knew she shouldn’t, but she was bursting with the good news and she had to share it with someone.

  “So he’s alive,” Baker said, his voice hollow with awe. “They’ve actually brought him back.”

  He was stretched out naked on the rumpled bed of his apartment, his body deeply tanned except for the narrow stretch that his briefs usually covered. An Linh lay beside him, still moist and warm from their lovemaking. A tropical downpour drummed at the bedroom’s lone window.

  “Cliff,” she said, stroking his bare chest, “this is strictly between the two of us. Totally off the record. If you try to make a story out of it, I’ll have to deny it.”

  Baker sat up abruptly, pulling his knees to his chin and locking his arms around them. He stared at his own image in the mirror above the bureau against the wall across from the bed.

  “We’ll release the story in a few months,” An Linh went on, “and I’ll make certain that you’re—”

  “Shh!” Baker hissed. “Genius at work.”

  She smiled up at his fiercely scowling face. Then, glancing at the digital clock on the dresser, she saw that she was running late for her dinner engagement. Leaving the Aussie to his own machinations, An Linh got up from the bed and walked lightly to the bathroom.

  She was luxuriating in the steamy enveloping warmth of the shower when she felt his hands on her.

  “Soap my back, will you?” she murmured.

  Baker complied, then slid his hands down her hips, her thighs. She turned to face him, and he sank to his knees, his hands reaching behind her now, grasping her slim buttocks, his tongue searching between her legs. The hot water throbbed against An Linh’s shoulders and back. The steam swirled and caressed them both. She dug her fingers into his golden hair and tilted her head back, eyes closed against the delicious hot shower. Her back arched, and she spasmed and gave out a long, wrenching sigh.

  With a knowing grin, Baker got to his feet and held her in his arms for long silent moments. She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately, thankfully.

  His grin widened. “My turn,” he said.

  An Linh smiled back at him. A small voice deep inside her mind told her that he never gave without taking, but she dismissed its warning and knelt before her handsome, smiling lover.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was still raining by the time An Linh was dressed and ready to leave for dinner. Standing in the apartment’s living room, she looked out through the windows at the rain drenching the parking lot.

  “Going to dinner?” Baker asked her.

  She had not heard him approaching her. He had the knack of moving noiselessly, like a shadow.

  “I’m meeting Father Lemoyne, remember?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I know. How’s he doing?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out. He’s just come back from Boston, the medical people at Harvard.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Baker said, looking away from An Linh toward his ghostly image reflected in the rainwashed windows. “The priest might be the way for you to get me inside the Vanguard labs.”

  “I’ll get you inside the labs, when the time comes. I’ll make certain that—”

  “Not ‘when the time comes,’ ” Baker said. “I want to get in there now. As soon as possible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could arrange for me to do a story about Father Lemoyne, if he’s really terminal.”

  An Linh felt the blood rising to her cheeks. “Cliff, you sound as if you want him to…to be terminal!”

  He shrugged carelessly. “If he’s not, that’s wonderful. Of course. But if he is, then he could be a big help to us.”

  “That’s awful!”

  He clasped her wrist in his strong grip. “Now don’t get sentimental on me, love. We’re talking a big story here. You do want me to get the inside track on this frozen astronaut story, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And once we get in among the scientists, we might even get a line on the cure for cancer they’ve developed.”

  “But they haven’t!”

  “Haven’t they?” He smirked.

  “Cliff, when you introduced me to Father Lemoyne, I didn’t think it was for…for something like this.”

  “Now listen to me, love. There’s a lot at stake here, and the least you can do is try to keep a professional attitude. After all, we’re not making him sick, you know.”

  Pulling away from him, An Linh replied, “No, but you seem pretty damned quick to think of how we can use his illness for your own benefit.”

  “It’s a big story, this frozen astronaut,” Baker insisted. “It’s important to the whole world, pet. They’re going to sit on it, you know. They’re going to keep it a secret for as long as we let them.”

  She shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t.”

  “Wouldn’t they?” Baker smiled at her like a grown man pitying a foolish child. “From what you told me about the board meeting, all they’re interested in is keeping him under wraps.”

  “That’s just for the time being.”

  “Really? I’ll tell you what’s going through their minds, love. They’re going to keep this all to themselves, like their cure for cancer. They want to have the secret of immortality for their own use. Not for you or me, pet. Not for the bleeding masses. For themselves and their friends. For the rich, who can pay millions. Not for us. Not for your mother.”

  That was the magic word, and he knew it. An Linh listened numbly as Baker told her what he wanted her to do.

  Minutes later she dashed out to the parking lot, wrapped in a monolayer raincoat and hood, so light and porous that it hardly hindered her hurried stride, yet totally impervious to the rain sweeping along the rows of parked automobiles. Her boots were similarly waterproof as she splashed through the puddles on the cement lot.

  The apartment building had been built on a scenic hilltop overlooking the city. Even in the gray, driving rain, Hilo’s soaring white towers and sprawling swirls of houses looked beautiful to An Linh. It was still a green city, despite the row of massive hotels that lined the beach like the wall of a fortress built to repel i
nvaders from the sea. Flowers blossomed everywhere, and stately palm trees lined street after street.

  But the city’s charms were not uppermost in An Linh’s mind. She ducked inside her car and slammed the door shut. Cliff wanted to use Father Lemoyne to get himself inside the labs and onto the inside track of the frozen astronaut story. He had introduced her to the priest months ago—was he thinking about this moment even back then? Was he thinking about it when he met me? she asked herself. Is Cliff using me, as well as the priest?

  The answer was, Of course he is. But is that why he sought me out? Does he really love me, or am I merely a way to the story he’s after?

  But if he’s right, she thought, if Vanguard really has developed a cure for cancer…and now they’ve revived the astronaut…Her thoughts spun. She saw her mother, alive again, young and vibrant and cured.

  Cliff doesn’t care about her, though. He doesn’t care about Father Lemoyne, either. All he really wants are his big stories—the cure for cancer, and immortality through freezing. The biggest news stories of a lifetime.

  An Linh shook her head as she tapped out the ignition code on the keyboard set into the console between the two bucket seats. I love Cliff, she told herself. That means I must trust him. He can go after the biggest news stories of the century, that’s only natural. That’s his profession. It doesn’t mean that he’s not in love with me. It doesn’t. It can’t!

  The electric motor whined complainingly and then hummed to life. Frowning at her inner thoughts, An Linh flicked on the guidance computer, punched in the address of the restaurant downtown where she was to meet Father Lemoyne, then studied the route that the computer marked in red on the street map its screen displayed.

  An Linh had to drive the car manually all the way, since the computer’s route avoided the electronically controlled freeways with their usual crush of homewardbound traffic. She parked as close as she could to the restaurant, then ran a block and a half through the spattering rain.

  Pushing open the door of the Japanese restaurant, An Linh stepped into a haven of warmth and pungent, tantalizing aromas. She slipped out of her raingear and accepted a plastic token from the hat-check robot. A human maître d’, a middle-aged Japanese man who looked slim and ascetic enough to have come recently from Japan, made a bow to An Linh that was low enough to be polite but quick enough to be obviously reluctant. He is from Japan, she thought. No American-born would be so uptight about bowing to a woman.

  “Father Lemoyne’s table, please,” she told him.

  He blinked once, then understood. “Ah, the priest. Yess. This way, prease.”

  He waved a kimono-clad waitress to him and left her to guide An Linh to her table. The restaurant was long and narrow, as if it had been built into a hallway separating two buildings. Heads turned as she followed the waitress through the closely packed tables. She still wore her board meeting “business clothes,” a simple long-sleeved Chinese red silk blouse and light gray skirt, modestly adorned with accents of costume jewelry. Yet she looked strikingly beautiful, her short-cropped black hair like an ebony helmet framing the ivory complexion of her high-cheeked face. Her body was slight, almost boyish, her almond eyes wide, a tantalizing conjugation of innocence and knowledge, of youth and worldliness, that made her look somehow vulnerable, in need of protection, utterly desirable. Men followed An Linh with their eyes. Women stared openly.

  Father Lemoyne was already seated at the very last table in the place, his back solidly planted against the rear wall. Above him hung a cheap reproduction of a fine Japanese silk print showing beautiful ladies in blue-and-white kimonos against a background of snow-topped mountains.

  Lemoyne looked like the ex-football player that he was. Ruddy face gone to jowls and creases, reddish hair fading to gray, big shoulders beginning to sag. He squeezed up from behind the table as An Linh approached. Even in his black clerical suit it was clear to see that his once powerful body had gone to fat.

  “I’m sorry to be late,” she said as the waitress held her chair for her.

  “I only just arrived a moment ago myself,” the priest said. A tumbler of whiskey sat before him.

  For an instant they stood facing each other: the heavyset, florid priest in his collar and black suit; the Asian beauty who seemed as fragile as a porcelain flower across the table from him.

  An Linh sat and ordered a sake. Lemoyne stared at his own drink, waiting.

  “Welcome home,” An Linh said. “I’m sorry it’s such a rainy day.”

  “Better than the weather in Boston,” answered the priest. “To think that I spent the first forty years of my life there.”

  “You got back this morning?”

  He nodded, still eyeing the whiskey. “I’ve got a fine case of jet lag. They can fly your body to Hawaii in two hours, but your stomach’s still in Boston.”

  She smiled at him. “You must have called me from the airport, then.”

  “I did. I was thinking about you while I was away.”

  “And the specialists…did they have good news for you?”

  Lemoyne’s face made a strange little half smile. “No, not really. To get at the tumor they’d have to cut away so much of my brain that I’d be a vegetable.”

  An Linh stared into his eyes. She saw no pain there, but no resignation, either. Lemoyne’s eyes flamed with raw animal fear.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  He grabbed for the whiskey and gulped at it. “Nothing to be done about it. God’s will and all that.”

  “How long?…”

  “I have a few months.” He was trying to keep his voice from trembling and not succeeding. “Maybe as much as a year.”

  “They could be wrong, couldn’t they?”

  “Anything is possible if God wills it so. There could be what the medical people call a spontaneous remission. I could make a pilgrimage to Lourdes. The world might end tomorrow….”

  She reached out and touched his sleeve. Her hand looked frail as a child’s next to his beefy clenched fist.

  “It’s painless,” he said. “I’ll just…lose my faculties as the tumor grows.” Another gulp of whiskey. An Linh prayed silently that her own drink would come. She felt the need of something that could burn inside her, the need to join this dying man at least in the act of drinking.

  “Imagine me in diapers,” he joked feebly. “But it won’t hurt. They assured me of that much. I won’t feel any pain. Toward the end I won’t even know what’s happening to me.”

  Tears were blurring An Linh’s vision as the waitress finally placed a ceramic bottle and tiny cup in front of her. “Another for you?” the waitress asked the priest cheerfully.

  He nodded, then drained the last of his drink.

  “There’s nothing that the doctors can do?” An Linh asked, remembering the calm, grave face of the chief internist at her father’s hospital in Avignon.

  “It’s God’s will,” Lemoyne said, just a hint of bitterness in his tone. “We all have to go to Him sooner or later. He just chose to make mine sooner.”

  “But…”

  He patted her outstretched hand. His fingers were damp from clutching the glass.

  “It’s in God’s hands,” he said, trying to sound resigned. “There’s not a thing we can do about it. Not a damned thing.”

  “But there is—”

  “No, no. It’s in God’s hands. No more of it. It’s too good to see you again, after all these weeks. I don’t want to spoil it.”

  An Linh lapsed into silence.

  “And how are things going with your new position?” he asked.

  “Very well,” she replied. “It’s much easier to be the director of the department than one of the workers. All I have to do is give orders and let others do the work.”

  “That’s great!” He actually laughed.

  The waitress brought Lemoyne’s second whiskey, and while she was at their table they both ordered sukiyaki. Another waitress, her kimono slightly stained and her hair a bit dis
heveled, cooked it at their table. An Linh enjoyed the pungent heat as the woman stirred in the vegetables and the sizzling slices of beef. After the waitress left them to their steaming bowls, An Linh and the priest ate in silence for several moments.

  Then, “There is something that we can do about your…condition,” she said.

  He was struggling doggedly with his chopsticks. For a heartbeat or two An Linh thought he might not have heard her words, or that he was ignoring them. But he looked up at her finally, his blue eyes still wide with fear.

  “And what would that be? A novena?”

  It was meant to be a little joke, so she smiled at him. “We could have you frozen.”

  He frowned at the idea. “Like your mother?”

  “Like my mother.”

  Waving the chopsticks almost angrily, Lemoyne said, “No, none of that for me. If I have to die, I’ll die when my appointed time comes. I’ll not have myself popped into some tin can filled with liquified air.”

  “The tumor in your brain,” An Linh said gently, “will not always be inoperable. Someday medical science will learn how to kill the tumor cells without damaging your brain.”

  Maybe they already know, she added silently, unable to speak the suspicion aloud. Maybe they already have the cure but are keeping it to themselves.

  Lemoyne was shaking his head slowly, unconsciously refusing to accept the possibility of hope.

  “If they can keep an astronaut frozen for years and then bring him back…”

  “They’ve brought him back?” he asked sharply.

  An Linh hesitated. “I can’t say it officially, but…yes, they have.”

  “They’ve brought him back to life? Really?”