Voyagers IV - The Return Read online

  “What’s this for?” he asked.

  “Cardiac stress test,” they answered in unison.

  Like robots, Tavalera thought, almost amused at them.

  As he started jogging he realized that the man next to him had a prosthetic leg. Looking farther down the row, he saw several more people with prostheses, including a grossly overweight woman whose flesh wobbled and jounced as she trotted sweatily on two artificial legs.

  Why don’t they rebuild the limbs with stem cell therapy? he wondered. That’s what they’d do on Goddard.

  The treadmill moved faster and faster, forcing Tavalera to run harder. He began to sweat, but instead of resenting the forced exertion he grinned inwardly. It felt good to be moving, to be working his body.

  A chime rang and the treadmill slowed to a stop.

  As he got off, Tavalera asked, “What’s next?”

  “Blood tests,” said the first orderly.

  “Needles,” said the second, with a malicious grin.

  It wasn’t all that bad, Tavalera decided afterward. He didn’t like being punctured, but the women who stuck him and drew his blood knew what they were doing. It hardly hurt at all.

  “Now what?” he asked as he walked, a little shakily, out of the blood-drawing station.

  “A shower,” said the first orderly.

  “You need it,” said the second one, wrinkling his nose.

  “Then you get dressed and see Dr. Mayfair,” said the first one.

  “The big boss,” said the second one, his malicious grin returning.

  They returned Tavalera to his cubicle of a room and gave him some privacy as he showered in the attached lavatory. When he came out of the shower his clothes were on the bed, neatly laid out.

  Dr. Mayfair’s office was spacious, with the first window that Tavalera had seen in the entire hospital. It looked out onto a parking lot filled with busses. The doctor was standing by the window looking up at the cloudy sky when the orderlies ushered Tavalera into his office. Mayfair was short but thick bodied. His hair was sandy, his face oval, with clear light brown eyes. He smiled pleasantly at Tavalera.

  “Ah! Our enigma.” Mayfair gestured to the round table near the window and sat in one of the chairs grouped around it.

  Tavalera took the chair next to his, grateful that he was back in his own slacks and shirt rather than the humiliating hospital gown.

  Mayfair pointed to the opposite wall and it immediately lit up with a group of charts and images. Tavalera recognized the brain scan he’d undergone a couple of hours earlier.

  Smiling amiably, Dr. Mayfair said, “I’ve been told that the engineers have a saying: ‘Hell is where everything checks, but nothing works.’ ”

  Tavalera nodded cautiously. “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.”

  “You’re something like that, Mr. Tavalera. We’ve scanned your brain and body; we’ve put you through a fairly strenuous stress test and done blood tests. Everything checks out quite normal.”

  Tavalera said nothing, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Which means, I’m afraid, that you are quite seriously deranged,” said Dr. Mayfair with a smile that looked almost joyful. But then his eyes went hard. “Or you’re lying through your teeth.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “Lying?” Tavalera yelped. “Why would I be lying? How in hell could I make up something so damned wild?”

  “Your language betrays you, Tavalera,” Mayfair said, his voice cold. “I have your complete dossier here. You tried to get out of your public-service duty when you found out you’d be sent to Jupiter. You never attended worship services while off-Earth. You haven’t been to church since you’ve returned.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You’re not a Believer.”

  “So what? I never made a secret of it.”

  Getting up from his chair and walking to the desk, Mayfair said, “You’ve rather reveled in your refusal to accept the faith. You’ve played the part of the rebel, haven’t you?”

  “Rebel? Me?”

  “And then you spent more than a year aboard that space habitat, that hotbed of malcontents and secularists. What did they teach you there? What instructions did you bring back with you?”

  Tavalera felt totally confused. “Instructions? I didn’t get any instruc—”

  “Don’t think you can hide behind those antiquated Constitutional rights you rebels always quote,” Mayfair said as he sat himself down behind his broad desk. “This is a matter of national security.”

  “Me? National security?”

  “Yes, you,” said Mayfair, an angry growl in his voice now. “You come back from space, after spending years with the exiles aboard Goddard, and suddenly this supposed visitor from the stars appears.”

  “Stoner’s from Earth,” Tavalera countered.

  “Stoner is a hoax! And you know it!”

  “I thought he might be, but . . . Chri . . . cripes, he appeared to me! He took me to his spacecraft!”

  “So you say. There is no evidence of that happening. Nothing except your unsupported word. Nothing at all.”

  “I’m not making it up!”

  Mayfair started to snap out a reply, thought better of it, took a deep breath instead, and folded his hands prayerfully on the desktop.

  At last he said, “Mr. Tavalera. I bear heavy responsibilities. I am not merely the head of this hospital. I am a member of the board of directors of the New Morality. I report directly to Bishop Zebulon Craig, who is only one step below Archbishop Overmire himself.”

  Tavalera blinked, trying to figure out where Mayfair was heading.

  “This visitor from the stars,” Mayfair went on, “this . . . this Keith Stoner, as he calls himself, is obviously a hoax. A well-planned hoax, I admit, but a hoax nonetheless.”

  “He’s real,” Tavalera muttered.

  “I know you would like us to believe that, but we’re going to get to the bottom of this conspiracy, believe me.”

  “It’s not a conspiracy! I saw—”

  “You’re lying!” Mayfair shouted. “That much is certain. You’re not delusional and there’s no physical trauma affecting your brain. Therefore you are lying. Admit it.”

  Tavalera got to his feet and walked from the little circular table by the window to the amply upholstered chair in front of the desk. His surprise and confusion at Mayfair’s wild accusations was giving way to a simmering anger.

  Leaning his knuckles on the desktop, he said, “Give me a lie detector test, then.”

  Mayfair smiled thinly at him. “You’ve been trained to deal with lie detectors, I’m sure.”

  Shaking his head, Tavalera asked, “What’s got you people so worked up about this? A visitor from the friggin’ stars! You oughtta be excited about it. You oughtta be trying your damnedest to talk with him, hear what he’s got to tell us!”

  “That’s exactly it!” Mayfair snapped, pointing an accusing finger at Tavalera. “You people want us to let this so-called star man spread his heresies among us.”

  “Heresies?”

  “He’s obviously not one of us. He didn’t send his message to Archbishop Overmire or any other religious figure on Earth. No, he wants to talk to scientists, to political leaders, even to the people at large. It’s a well-conceived propaganda ploy, created by secular humanists, aimed at undermining the religious faith of Believers all around the world.”

  “That’s crazy!” Tavalera blurted.

  “Is it? You were very clever to suggest a hoax originating aboard habitat Goddard. Your intent was to send us in the wrong direction, wasn’t it? The originators of the heretical ploy are right here on Earth, aren’t they?”

  “How the hell would I know?” Tavalera snapped.

  Mayfair smiled grimly at him.

  “And what if it’s not a hoax?” Tavalera insisted. “What if it’s real? What if this guy Stoner is really what he claims to be?”

  “Impossible.”

  “All right
. What if he’s really an alien, but he’s shaped himself in human form to make contact with us? What then?”

  Mayfair shuddered visibly. “Impossible,” he repeated, but his voice was lower, weaker.

  “He’s real,” Tavalera said firmly.

  “He is not. And you are going to admit that.” Mayfair turned slightly and said to the empty air, “Security.”

  Within a heartbeat the office door swung open and a trio of uniformed men stepped in.

  Mayfair got to his feet. “You’re going to admit it’s a hoax,” he said to Tavalera. “And you’re going to tell us who’s behind it. We’ve had experience with conspirators and heretics before. They all confess, sooner or later.”

  Christ Almighty, Tavalera thought, it’s the friggin’ Spanish Inquisition all over again!

  The three guards advanced toward Tavalera. He felt suddenly queasy at the sight of their hard, emotionless faces. They reached for his arms . . .

  And froze.

  Keith Stoner stood in the corner of the room, by the table next to the window, his bearded face set in a scowl.

  “He’s telling you the truth, Dr. Mayfair. I’m real and you’d better tell your superiors they’re going to have to deal with me. Or go as extinct as the dinosaurs.”

  BOOK II

  KEITH STONER

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  Sir Arthur C. Clarke

  CHAPTER 1

  “It’s all wrong,” said Keith Stoner. “Jumbled. Distorted.”

  His wife sat beside him on the plushly cushioned sofa. On the other side of the coffee table sat their son, Rick, and daughter, Cathy, in comfortable armchairs. Stoner had produced the illusion of a snug old-fashioned Vermont ski lodge inside the starship’s cocoon of energy, complete with a fireplace crackling in one pine-paneled corner and frosted windows that looked out on a snow-filled forest of deep green fir trees—even though there had been no snow in New England for more than a generation.

  “They’re so xenophobic,” said Jo. “Worse than ever.”

  Jo Camerata was a dark-haired beauty whose Mediterranean ancestry showed in her lush figure and dark, sparkling eyes. She had been an undergraduate student when she first fell in love with Keith Stoner, a lifetime ago. Stoner was a NASA mission specialist, an astrophysicist who had become an astronaut so that he could work on Big Eye, the mammoth telescope that was being built in orbital space. It was Big Eye that first imaged the alien starship as it entered the solar system.

  Stoner led the international cabal of scientists that cajoled and inveigled the belligerent, suspicious governments of East and West to suspend their Cold War hostilities long enough to send him in a spacecraft out to the starship as it neared Earth. It was a sarcophagus, bearing the preserved corpse of the intelligent creature who’d sent it out among the stars as a message to any intelligent species who encountered it.

  When Stoner became stranded on the alien spacecraft, frozen in the cryogenic cold of space, Jo spent years clawing her way to the top of Vanguard Industries, one of the world’s most powerful multinational conglomerates, and eventually sent an expedition to capture the alien sarcophagus before it left the solar system entirely with Keith Stoner’s preserved body aboard it.

  The technology that human scientists gleaned from the alien visitor changed many industries, while Jo Camerata kept Stoner’s frozen body cyronically preserved in a specially built laboratory until her corporate researchers learned how to return him to life.

  They married and had two children, even while Stoner gradually discovered the alien powers that now inhabited his body. He set out to transform the world, and Jo used the resources of Vanguard Industries to help him.

  But the world resisted transformation, and Stoner slowly, reluctantly learned that it would take generations, centuries, before the human race could give up its ancient fears and hatreds. When their daughter was murdered in a botched attempt to kidnap him, Stoner decided to build a new starship and leave Earth forever with his wife, his son, and the fetus of his daughter, cloned from the cells of her slaughtered body.

  What they found among the stars forced them to return to Earth, a different Earth from the one they’d left, but a world that needed transformation even more urgently than the one they’d left behind. A world that did not have generations or centuries to transform itself. A world that was on the brink of a man-made extinction event.

  “They’re beyond help,” said Rick. He had kept his body image as youthful as a twenty-year-old, although the years showed in his eyes, gray-blue as a storm-swept sea, much like his father’s.

  “I can’t believe that,” Stoner said.

  “You’ve tried to make contact with them,” said Cathy. She had been fourteen when she was murdered; now she appeared to be a young adult, about her brother’s age. “They’ve ignored every one of our attempts.”

  “We’ve got to keep trying,” Stoner insisted. “We’ve got to.”

  Jo rested a hand on his shoulder. “Is it worth it?”

  He looked into his wife’s dark eyes. “The survival of the human race? Yes, I think that’s worth a lot. Everything.”

  “I wonder,” said Rick. “Maybe they don’t want to be saved.”

  “That’s not fair,” Cathy objected. “They don’t know what they’re up against.”

  Rick sneered at his sister. “And if they knew they’d just kill themselves sooner.”

  Stoner asked his son, “Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t think they’re worth the trouble, Dad.”

  He turned to Cathy. “And you, Cath? How do you feel about this?”

  His daughter glanced at her mother, then answered, “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe Rick is right. But . . .” She left her thought unspoken.

  Jo said, “You don’t have any memory of Earth, Cathy. You were born on this starship.”

  Nodding uncertainly, Cathy replied, “I’ve been watching them, studying them through the ship’s sensors.”

  “Me, too,” Rick interjected. “I haven’t seen much that’s worth saving.”

  Cathy asked, “Why can’t we go down to Earth and see them for ourselves?”

  “You can get all the information you want from the ship’s sensors,” Jo replied.

  “But that’s not the same,” her daughter said. “I mean, you go down there, Dad. Why can’t Rick and me? It’s not fair.”

  Jo objected, “It’s dangerous down there. All those people, billions of them. Some of them are crazy: terrorists, rapists, murderers . . .”

  Cathy looked into her mother’s troubled eyes. “I was murdered once; I know, Mom. But we’ve got all the ship’s systems to protect us now. We’ll be safe.”

  Shaking her head, Jo began, “I wouldn’t feel—”

  With a youthful grin, Rick said, “Come on, Mom. You can keep watch over us. If there’s any trouble you can yank us back to the ship in a nanosecond.”

  Jo turned to Stoner. He scratched at his beard and said, “Maybe they should go down there and see their home world close-up. Mingle with the people.” To Cathy and Rick he added, “See what you think about the human race after you’ve lived among them for a bit.”

  Jo started to object, but Cathy laughed. “Like an anthropological expedition?”

  Rick snapped, “More like a trip to the zoo.”

  Jo objected, “It could be dangerous.”

  “We’ll be protected,” said Rick. “They can’t penetrate our systems.”

  “And we won’t let anyone know who we are,” Cathy said, warming to the idea. “We’ll travel incognito.”

  Jo was still apprehensive. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “It’d be exciting!” Cathy said.

  “Interesting, at least,” her brother agreed.

  “They’ll be fine,” Stoner said to Jo. “You can keep watch over them from here in the ship. Pull them back here to safety the instant anything dangerous crops up.”

  His wife still looked mis
trustful, but she said nothing.

  “Okay,” Rick said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Where should we go first?” Cathy asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Rick. “Come on; let’s check the surveillance records.”

  The two of them winked out of their parents’ presence.

  “They’re like kids going on a vacation trip,” Jo said worriedly.

  “They’ll be all right,” Stoner said.

  “And you?” Jo asked. “What will you be doing while they’re traipsing around down there?”

  He answered, “This fellow Tavalera. They’re trying to use him to find out if we’re really from the stars. He’s going to be my contact man.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Tavalera?” Jo asked.

  “He seems a likely candidate for contact,” Stoner replied. “His mind’s still adaptable, not fixated on an inflexible worldview. He’s been off-Earth; he even wants to return to the habitat in orbit around Saturn.”

  Jo pointed out, “Yet when you made contact with him he collapsed in panic and confusion.”

  Stoner nodded ruefully. “I guess I overwhelmed him. Too much for him to accept, all at once.”

  “How can we tell them what they need to know?” Jo wondered. “How can we make any kind of meaningful contact with people who are so xenophobic, so frightened of the idea that they might not be alone in the universe?”

  “And what will happen when we tell them the truth?” Stoner added. “The terrible, unavoidable truth?”

  “Is Tavalera the best you can do?”

  “I’ll contact others,” Stoner said as he extended his consciousness to Tavalera’s mind. “But for now—”

  He stiffened with surprise. And annoyance.

  “What is it?” Jo asked.

  “They’re threatening to torture the poor guy!”

  “Torture?”

  “A man named Mayfair is threatening Tavalera with torture, because he can’t accept what Tavalera’s telling him.”

  “You’ll have to help him!”