by Ben Bova
He nodded, struggling to pull himself together.
She pointed toward the tiny window at her elbow. “We are coming down for a landing. The flight is almost over.”
Stoner leaned across to look out the window. Nothing but green hills and country streams. Turning, he looked out the other side, across the empty aisle. No sign of a city.
“I thought we were going to Budapest,” he said.
Ilona Lucacs smiled apologetically. “Not exactly,” she said. “Not exactly Budapest.”
Jo swam the length of the pool slowly, methodically, using an overhand crawl stroke that provided the most propulsion through the water for the least amount of exertion.
Her mind was racing, though. Keith should have called by now. Even with the time difference he ought to be in Budapest. She had tried to reach him on the phone but the damned computer said it could not establish contact with him. Something’s wrong, she knew. That wrist comm unit ought to be good anywhere, that’s the reason we manufacture them. Millions of them sold all around the world. Why isn’t Keith’s working?
She reached the end, kick-turned, and started languidly back for the shallow end again. Maybe he doesn’t want to be contacted? That young Hungarian bitch was damned good-looking. I know I can trust Keith. Sure. But can I trust her?
Standing hip-deep in the crystal-clear water, Jo climbed out of the pool and called to her children, sitting under the big palm tree at the end of the patio, watching the Saturday morning science shows on TV.
“Cathy, Rickie—come up to my office. Time for a fire drill.”
“Aw, Mom, do we have to?”
“Again?”
Catherine was fourteen, that lean-legged coltish age when she was turning into a woman but still wanted to be a little girl. Richard, at ten, already showed his father’s stubborn jaw and penetrating gray eyes.
Jo did not bother to say another word. Both children knew that when their mother gave an order she expected them to follow it. There was no wheedling with Mom.
The three of them trooped upstairs to Jo’s office, just off the master bedroom, Jo wrapped in a sunset orange bath towel, Cathy in a flowered bikini, Rickie in his customary ragged cut-offs.
For more than an hour Jo drilled her children on the security measures that protected the house. Escape routes, emergency numbers to call, safe nooks for them to hide in until rescued. She called it a fire drill, but she also impressed on them that burglars might try to break into the house.
“Or kidnappers,” Rickie said solemnly. “Like on TV.”
“Yes,” Jo nodded, equally serious, “there’s always that possibility.”
“Kidnappers?” Cathy looked frightened.
“Don’t be upset,” said her mother. “There are always at least five live servants here at the house at all times, and they know how to deal with intruders.”
“You mean like Claudia and Uncle Nunzio?” Cathy looked unconvinced. “They’re so old!”
“Not too old to protect you,” Jo said. “And there are plenty of Vanguard security guards down the road, just a couple of minutes away.”
“They’ve got guns,” Rickie said, somewhat enviously.
“And we have all the electronic alarms and detectors,” Jo said, still concerned that Cathy might be frightened. She wanted her children to know what to do in an emergency, but she did not want to scare them unnecessarily.
“If anything happens when your father or I are not here, you can always call Vic Tomasso,” she told them. “If you see or hear anything that you think is suspicious, phone Vic right away.”
WASHINGTON
THE Secretary of Defense, whose normal expression was a sullen scowl, actually smiled as he began to speak. The President sank back in her chair, realizing they were in for a scolding.
“So it’s finally come,” said Defense, hunching forward and locking his hands prayerfully on the gleaming broad table top. “After years of starving the Defense Department, you need the Army. After ignoring the needs of the nation and trusting to a bunch of foreigners in the Peace Enforcers to do the job Americans should be doing for themselves, you need us. You need the military discipline and dedication that you’ve scorned for so many years.”
The Secretary of the Interior, who was once on the U.S. Olympic boxing team, snapped from across the table, “Cut the crap, Jerry. We got no time for speeches. This is an emergency.”
Defense glared at his black colleague, but closed his mouth. The President sighed audibly.
“We’ve got to seal our borders,” said the Secretary of Agriculture, “and prevent this virus from getting into the country.”
“It’s already here,” said the Surgeon General, with some exasperation in his voice. “We’ve had eight cases in New Orleans, eleven in Florida, and sixty-three in the New York area.”
“It’s coming in from Latin America,” Agriculture fumed. “We ought to go down there and wipe it out. Those damned greasers down there don’t know the first thing about sanitation or public health.”
Eying the three Hispanics around the table, the President replied, “This isn’t the old days, Harry. We can’t muscle our neighbors. Nobody can.”
The old Pentagon had been transformed into the new Executive Office Building. Not only had the armed services shrunk severely over the past decade, but the other agencies of the government had slowly decreased as well, as computers and artificial intelligence systems gradually, grudgingly replaced the human bureaucracy through the attrition of death and retirement. Now most of the government’s administrative offices were housed in the vast Pentagon and the old buildings in Washington itself had been turned into museums for the tourists to wander through.
The President tried to regain control of the meeting. “The facts are these,” she said crisply. “This virus is carried in drinking water. It has already reached the United States. The World Health Organization is attempting to identify it and find a way to stop it. They have asked our National Institutes of Health to work with them.”
The Surgeon General nodded gravely.
“We ought to inspect every person coming into the country,” Agriculture insisted. “If they object, don’t let ’em in!”
The rest of the Cabinet ignored him.
“For the time being,” the President continued, “the only thing we can do is have people boil their drinking water. I will declare a National Emergency tomorrow, and the Army will begin setting up emergency treatment centers across the country, starting with the most crowded areas of our cities.”
She carefully avoided using the word “ghetto.” In her victorious election campaign of the previous year she had triumphantly declared that there were no more ghettos in American cities.
“Panic,” muttered the Vice President. “This is gonna cause the god-damnedest panic you ever saw. There’s gonna be riots in the streets once the word of this gets out.”
“That’s why we need the Army. To keep things under control,” the President replied.
The Secretary of Defense smiled again, as if they had acknowledged that he had been right all along.
The Secretary for Space, usually silent in Cabinet meetings, raised a timid hand. “Might I suggest,” he said in a thin voice, “that we follow the advice of the Secretary of Agriculture as far as our facilities off-Earth are concerned. Each person bound for a space facility should be examined and, if found to be carrying the virus, should be refused entry.”
“You mean for private carriers as well as government?” asked the Secretary of State. “Our commercial space lines carry citizens from all over the world.”
“I mean for everybody,” said Space, with unusual firmness. “If that virus gets established in the closed environment of a space habitat it will kill everybody in a few days.”
He did not say aloud what he was really thinking: If the virus is as deadly as they had been told, the entire human race might be wiped off the face of the Earth in a matter of weeks. Then all that would be left was the hundr
ed thousand or so who lived in space habitats. He was already making plans to move his entire family to the largest habitat in the L5 region.
BOOK III
Krishna: “The wise grieve not for those who live; and they grieve not for those who die—for life and death shall pass away.”
CHAPTER 15
THE Hungarian transport was coming down at a military airstrip deep in the wooded hills. Stoner saw a long, narrow lake as they started their descent but it disappeared behind the tree-covered ridges.
He tapped at his wrist comm unit for a location fix. It did not respond.
“This aircraft is shielded,” Ilona said over the howl of the engines. “It is a necessary precaution.”
“Necessary?” Stoner asked sharply. “For whom?”
She looked uncomfortable. “It is not my doing. I am merely following orders.”
“That’s what the Nazis said,” Stoner muttered.
Ilona pretended not to hear, but her cheeks colored and she turned toward the window.
When handed a lemon, Stoner said to himself, start making lemonade. Loud enough to be heard over the engines’ roar, he asked, “Is this the country where they make that red wine we had last night, the Bull’s Blood?”
“Oh no,” Ilona replied, raising her voice as the engines’ scream rose even higher. “The wine comes from Eger, to the east.”
The plane lurched and she grabbed compulsively at the armrests. Stoner felt his stomach drop away, then climb up into his throat, and then the landing gear hit the ground with a walloping thump. The plane bounced back into the air, wobbled along the runway for an awfully long time, and finally hit the ground again with another hard bang and screeching of tires.
“Must be very gusty out there,” Stoner muttered as they rolled along the paved runway, thrust reversers screaming, brakes groaning like a live bull being dragged across the concrete. Trees whizzed by and finally he saw a few hangars and other buildings.
At last the plane lurched to a stop and the engines whined down into silence. Stoner wiped his brow as the main hatch was opened from the outside. Three men climbed in, two in tan soldier’s uniforms and the third a stocky dark-eyed young man wearing brown corduroy slacks and a faded blue windbreaker. The soldiers had pistols on their hips in gleamingly oiled leather holsters.
Ilona pushed past Stoner to get into the aisle.
“Dr. Stoner,” she said, her eyes flashing, “may I introduce to you Doctor Professor Zoltan Janos, of the University of Budapest.”
Janos was short and round, hardly taller than Ilona, with a barrel-chested torso that seemed too big for his slim arms and legs. High domed forehead, thinning hair. The dark fringe of a beard accentuated the roundness of his face. His eyes, though, were deep set and as intense as laser beams.
“An honor, Dr. Stoner.” His voice was clear and as sweet as the finest Irish tenor’s.
Stoner pulled himself out of the seat but had to bend over in the low confines of the plane’s aisle. He took Janos’s extended hand and asked, “Any relation to the legendary Hungarian patriot, Hary Janos?”
The younger man’s eyes widened momentarily. He almost smiled. But he controlled himself and said a bit stiffly, “No. I deal with realities, not legends.”
Stoner would have shrugged if he had not been stooped over.
“I must ask you for the communications unit on your wrist, please,” said Janos. “It will be returned to you when you leave.”
Stoner hesitated a moment, then unstrapped the bracelet and handed it to the Hungarian. “I would like to tell my wife that I am alive and well,” he said. “She expected me to be in Budapest tonight. So did I.”
Janos nodded curtly as he turned and started for the hatch. “Of course. You may telephone her from the lodge. But you will not be permitted to reveal your whereabouts to her.”
“Not be permitted?”
“It is a security precaution,” Ilona said hastily.
“Why all the cloak and dagger?” Stoner wondered, following them down the aisle. “I thought you people were scientists.”
“We are,” Ilona assured him.
Stepping down the shaky aluminum ladder to the ground, Stoner stretched his frame and felt tendons in his arms and shoulders pop deliciously. A warm wind tousled his hair; in the distance he saw the trees bending and swaying.
“Why all the secrecy?” he asked again.
Janos replied, “You will understand when we show you our laboratory.”
More curious than apprehensive, Stoner let them lead him to an old forest-green sedan that had obviously gone months, perhaps years, since its last washing.
“The laboratory is up in the hills, at the lodge,” said Ilona as she and Janos climbed into the back with him. The two soldiers squeezed in up front with the driver, who was also in military uniform.
“Vic, he hasn’t called and he doesn’t answer my calls,” Jo’s image in the phone screen was saying. “I want you to find him!”
Tomasso shifted uneasily in his desk chair. “That won’t be easy…”
“If it were easy I’d have already done it!” she snapped. “Find him! Now!”
The screen went blank. Tomasso licked his lips. He had never seen the president of Vanguard so distressed. But her husband had never disappeared before, either.
Is this a test? Tomasso asked himself. A setup, to see if I’m really worth what she’s paying me. Or maybe she suspects the connection with Hsen.
I’ve got to be careful here. Verrry careful. It’s like walking through a minefield.
Victor Francis Tomasso had learned from earliest childhood that a smile and a bit of fancy footwork can move you along on the road of life. The youngest of eight children evenly divided between boys and girls, he had been babied by his mother, bullied by his older brothers, and beaten by his father whenever the old man needed somebody to bolster his machismo. A rough day on the construction job? Wham for little Vickie. Lost the paycheck on the ponies? Whack the kid for making too much noise.
Victor discovered early on that he could start screaming as soon as his father raised his hand, and his mother or his sisters would run to his rescue. By the time he was four he had learned to start family arguments by deliberately getting his father’s goat, then screeching before the first blow landed. His father never caught on. Neither did his sisters nor, most important of all, his mother.
It seemed that no matter how much money his father earned on his construction jobs, there was never enough to go around. Buffalo was not a fast-lane kind of city, but all the Tomassos knew that they were close to the bottom of the ladder even in their own run-down blue collar neighborhood. Vic’s mother worked longer hours than his father running the inventory programs for a grocery warehouse. All the kids got jobs as soon as they were able. Still they were poor, and the ads they watched on TV rubbed it in every hour of every day.
Vic’s oldest brother got himself killed in a gang fight before he was sixteen. Two of his sisters got married early and moved away. Vic saw the handwriting on the wall: if he didn’t make his own move soon, he would be left alone with his aging mother and father, and then he would never get away.
So he took off the day he was supposed to start high school. And he never returned. He learned very quickly that a bright young man could live nicely if he knew how to get himself a driver’s license and a Social Security card. Smiling and flirting with the dumpy, dough-faced women who ran most town hall offices was a big help. But once he learned how to finagle computers, Vic had it made.
His father had given him one piece of wisdom, years earlier. The family had been eating supper, gathered around the nightly network news on TV. The screen showed six smiling, extremely well-dressed men walking away from a courthouse in New York City. Or maybe it was Washington. The sound track told how these six Wall Street brokers had been accused of stealing millions of dollars from their clients, but the judge had let them go free.
“Steal enough money and you can walk home,” said
Tommy, the oldest, the one who would die with a knife in his spleen four blocks from his house.
“There’s more fuckin’ money stolen with a briefcase,” said their father, “than with a gun.”
Vic remembered that. And once he had talked his way into a job tapping data into a computer for the billing department of a Minneapolis department store, Vic recalled his father’s words time and again.
He never stole enough to get caught, just enough to live a little better than his salary. With his charm and the money he could spend, he climbed a ladder of women that eventually led to Vanguard Industries’ headquarters in Hawaii. He was in the big leagues now, and he did not have to steal anymore. He simply became a double agent. Selling his services to more than one company was much better than stealing. More money and less risk.
Until now.
Tomasso leaned back in his chair and put his expensively booted feet on his desk. He closed his eyes and began to analyze his situation. Jo Camerata wants me to find her husband. Hsen and his people need to know where Stoner is, and when he’s going to be at his house.
Okay, no conflict there. Find Stoner and they’ll both be happy. The problem is, how do I find Stoner?
As they drove up into the wooded hills Stoner sensed enormous tension in Zoltan Janos. The man was wound tighter than the spring on a crossbow. One touch and he’ll shoot off.
Ilona was growing tenser with each second, too. At first Stoner thought that she was merely anticipating the chance to plug herself in to her pleasure machine once more. But as the car wound up the steep twisting road he began to realize that Ilona was picking up on Janos’s tension.
He studied the professor. Young for that honor. No more than thirty, thirty-two. Very committed to his work, that was obvious. He must be the one who got Ilona started on the brain stimulation. Does he do it himself? Is he addicted too? Stoner decided that Janos was not. He’s too wrapped up in his work for that. He doesn’t need the pleasure stimulator; he’s got enough stimulation already.
