Voyagers I

by Ben Bova

  Despite himself, Stoner could hear bits and pieces of their discussions. The project had acquired a code name: Project JOVE. And their arguing was mostly about where to place Project JOVE. McDermott kept bellowing about Arecibo. But more and more the other voices countered with another name: Kwajalein.

  “What are you doing?” Jo asked.

  She sat up in the bed, tucking the sheet modestly under her armpits. It was early morning, a quiet Sunday in mid-November. Crisp sunshine filtered through the bedroom curtains of the New Hampshire house.

  Jo had arrived on Friday evening, as usual, with a heavy folder of photographs from Big Eye under her arm. They were stamped Confidential and addressed to Stoner. The photos were beamed by laser from the orbiting telescope to NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Maryland. From there they were transmitted by secure wirephoto cable to the Navy headquarters in Boston’s virtually deserted waterfront. Jo picked them up at the gray Navy building each Friday afternoon and drove them up to Stoner in New Hampshire. And stayed the weekend.

  He was sitting at the little maple writing desk the Navy guards had found for him, bent over a sheet of paper.

  “I’m writing a letter,” he replied, “to an old friend of mine. One of my former teachers. He’s an astrophysicist: Claude Appert. Lives in Paris.”

  “He’s French?” Jo asked.

  “As French as the Eiffel Tower.” Stoner finished addressing the envelope and turned in his chair to face Jo. “I want you to mail this for me when you get back to Cambridge.”

  Her brows arched upward.

  “They won’t let me mail anything out of here,” Stoner explained. “Especially overseas.”

  “What’s in the letter?” she asked.

  He folded two flimsy sheets of paper and tucked them into the envelope. “I’m asking him if anybody in the European astronomical community has picked up unusual radio signals from Jupiter.”

  “That’s a security violation, isn’t it?” Jo pointed out.

  With a shake of his head, Stoner said, “I didn’t say we had found anything. I just asked if he’s heard anything.”

  Jo said, “The Navy wouldn’t…”

  “Listen to me,” he snapped. “They’re using us, Jo. Do you understand? Using us. We’ve stumbled across an incredible discovery, and all they can think of is to keep it secret and try to turn it to their own military advantage.”

  “But…”

  “But nothing! We spend our lives squeezing out every drop of knowledge about the universe that we can, and they treat us like civil servants. They take our knowledge and turn it into weapons. They throw us in the gutter whenever they feel like it, whenever they decide to cut down on the money they spend for research. Cattle are treated better! The government spends more money subsidizing the goddamned tobacco industry—causing cancer—than it spends on cancer research.”

  “What’s that got to do with the radio signals?” Jo asked softly.

  Stoner was on his feet now, lecturing, forgetting that he was naked. “When we come up with some hint of power, with some new idea that might help them control people or kill them, then they put us into harnesses and won’t let us work on anything else.”

  “We don’t live in a peaceful world, Keith.”

  “I know that. But what’s Tuttle’s first reaction to the possibility that we’ve found intelligent life? Not awe. Not even curiosity. Not even fear! They want to lay their hands on any new technology the aliens might have—so that they can improve their weaponry.”

  Jo said nothing.

  “That’s why they want to keep this news away from men like Sagan and Phil Morrison. Those men have international reputations. They can get the United Nations or some other international organization to make a united, worldwide program out of this. The military doesn’t want that! They won’t allow it! That’s why they’ve got me bottled up here like a prisoner. That’s why they want to move the whole damned operation off to some military base. They want to keep the whole damned thing a secret.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, I’m going to blow the lid off this thing,” Stoner said, waving the envelope in one hand. “That’s what this letter is all about.”

  “Keith, you’re only going to get yourself in real trouble.”

  “We’re in real trouble now,” he countered, “and as long as they can keep this thing secret, the whole world is in trouble.”

  “I don’t know if I should mail this for you, Keith,” Jo said.

  He walked over to the bed, sat on its edge beside her. “Mail it. They can’t put me into any deeper trouble than I am now. And it’s important that the whole scientific community learns about what’s going on here.”

  Reluctantly, Jo took the letter from his hand. She looked at the address, then turned and placed the envelope on the bed table beside her purse.

  Stoner didn’t tell her that the second sheet in the envelope was addressed to one of the authors whose book he had read a few nights earlier. A Russian linguist who had written an interesting monograph about possible extraterrestrial languages: Professor Kirill Markov, of Moscow.

  More weeks went by, and Stoner patiently worked by himself while the wrangling went on in the next room.

  McDermott promised us a warm winter, Stoner grinned to himself. It’ll be April Fools’ Day before we get out of New England.

  Thompson brought the Englishman to the house on a bitterly cold morning, one of those New England days when the sun shines brilliantly out of an absolutely blue sky, but the air is a frigid mass of biting dry polar stuff that slides in from Canada and sends thermometers down to zero for days on end.

  From inside the house it looked beautiful: bright sunshine glittering on pristine snow, trees stretching bare limbs into the crystal sky. Stoner spent all of two minutes admiring it when he first arose.

  He was quickly down in the dining room, chugging away at the computer keyboard, exasperated because there just weren’t enough early observations of the spacecraft to get a true fix on its origin. A blast of cold air told him that someone had just come in through the door in the rear of the kitchen.

  Stoner didn’t bother looking up. The computer terminal was starting to rattle off the answers to his latest equations, typing automatically, chattering across the paper at an inhumanly mad speed, numbers and symbols springing across the sheets faster than his eyes could follow.

  Jeff Thompson called, “Hi, Keith. Busy?”

  Stoner turned in the dining room chair, an acid reply on his tongue, but saw that Thompson had an older man with him.

  “Keith, this is Professor Roger Cavendish.”

  Stoner saw a man of about sixty, tall but very spare, thinning white hair, bony skull of a face, deepset eyes, bushy eyebrows. He stood there in his overcoat and scarf, gloves in one hand, and gave Stoner a quizzical half-smile.

  “Professor Cavendish?” Stoner asked. “From Jodrell Bank?”

  “Yes,” Cavendish said softly. “Quite. Don’t tell me my reputation has preceded me?”

  “Your work on organic molecules in interstellar clouds isn’t exactly obscure,” Stoner said, getting up from his chair and extending his hand to the Englishman.

  Cavendish’s hand was cold, his grip lukewarm.

  “And you’re Stoner, the astronaut, eh?”

  “Former astronaut.”

  “Yes. Quite.”

  Thompson took the coats and yelled in from the kitchen that he would put on a kettle for tea.

  “There’s instant coffee, if you prefer,” Stoner suggested.

  Cavendish actually shuddered.

  Stoner walked into the living room. Cavendish’s impressive brows went up when he saw the pool.

  “My god, what splendor. Is it heated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, how stupid of me. Otherwise it’d be a skating rink in this weather, wouldn’t it?”

  Stoner grinned. “Well, there’s a lot of hot air pumped into this room. The military and logistics types
have their meetings in here.”

  “Ah. I see. Naturally, they’d take the best facilities for themselves.”

  Gesturing him to an armchair, Stoner asked, “What brings you to this place?”

  Cavendish sat down and stretched pipestem legs. He was the perfect picture of an English academic: baggy tweed suit, sweater beneath his jacket, drooping little bow tie.

  “NATO, actually,” he replied. “Your intelligence people have been asking some interesting questions about radio signals, so our intelligence people put two and two together and finally NATO got into the act. One thing led to another, and here I am.”

  “You’re representing NATO?”

  “Quite.”

  “And you’ll go with us when we move to Arecibo, or Kwajalein, or wherever they put us?”

  “Lord, I hope not. Spent enough of my life in tropical paradises.”

  Stoner sank back into his armchair, thinking, So they’ve brought NATO into it. Maybe my letter to Claude helped. I wonder if he forwarded the note to that Russian linguist?

  Thompson came in with a tray bearing three mugs. Stoner took his and saw that it was black coffee. One sip, though, convinced him never to allow Thompson to make coffee for him again.

  “Professor Cavendish was a prisoner of war for nearly five years,” Thompson said. “In the Pacific.”

  “Burma, actually,” said Cavendish. “Bridge over the River Kwai and that sort of thing. Very nasty. Best forgotten, if you can.”

  Within minutes their national origins and earlier lives were forgotten as they started talking shop.

  “There’s just not enough data,” Stoner admitted, “to backtrack the thing’s point of origin. I don’t think we’ll ever figure out where it came from.”

  “But you have enough to show that it couldn’t have been launched from Jupiter,” Cavendish said.

  “I think so,” Stoner said. “We’ve tried every possible launch window. If the spacecraft appeared near Jupiter at the same time the radio pulses started, there isn’t any possible way it could have been launched from Jupiter itself. No way.”

  “It’s a negative proof,” Thompson said.

  “All the stronger for that,” said Cavendish. “If we can definitely rule out Jupiter as the origin of our visitor, then that’s quite an accomplishment.”

  “I suppose the next step would be to rule out the other planets.”

  “Easily done. I should think your computer could crunch through those numbers quickly enough.”

  Stoner stretched his legs out and slouched back on his chair. He put the steaming coffee cup on his belt buckle and said, “So it’s definite—the thing came from outside the solar system. We have the numbers to prove that.”

  “We will have,” Thompson said, “in a few days.”

  “But that makes things even more puzzling, doesn’t it?” said Cavendish.

  “How so?”

  “Well, if it came from outside the solar system, from another star, it must have taken thousands of years for the blasted thing to reach this far. Millions of years, more likely.”

  “If it’s an unmanned probe…”

  “Even unmanned”—Cavendish waved his emptied teacup—“a piece of machinery that can stay intact and operate reliably for millennia? For eons? Difficult to believe.”

  “For human machinery.”

  “What if there’s a crew aboard?” Thompson mused. “Our own spacecraft have worked better when astronauts were aboard to repair malfunctions.”

  “But it’s the blasted time factor that makes all these arguments so difficult,” Cavendish insisted. “If you have a spacecraft traveling from one star to another it would take so many centuries that the crew would have to be prepared to spend its entire life on the ship…plus the lives of its children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—dozens of whole generations, don’t you see?”

  “Not if the ship could fly at the speed of light, or close to it,” Stoner said.

  “Relativistic effects,” Thompson muttered. “Time dilation.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Cavendish countered. “And your own observations show it poking along at a rather sedate speed, actually, more like your Voyager and Mariner probes.”

  Thompson finished his cup and got to his feet. “Well, one thing’s for sure. Whichever way you look at it, the damned thing is impossible.”

  “But it’s there,” said Stoner.

  “Ahh,” Cavendish said with a growing smile. “That’s what makes science interesting, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  TOP SECRET

  Memorandum

  TO: Lt. R. J. Dooley, U. S. Naval Intelligence

  FROM: Capt. G. V. Yates, NATO/HQ

  SUBJECT: Security clearance, Prof. Roger H. T. Cavendish, FRS, FIAC, OBE, PhD.

  1. Prof. Cavendish holds security clearances up to and including TOP SECRET from British Army, Royal Scientific Establishment, and NATO. See attached documentation.

  2. Latest security check was concluded 24 Aug 80.

  3. Initial security clearance was granted Cavendish 15 Dec 59 after his repatriation from USSR in 1957. He was a POW in Burma, later Manchuria, and then taken into custody by Soviet troops at end of WWII. He remained in USSR voluntarily until 1957, when repatriated to UK.

  4. British MI suspected Cavendish as a Soviet agent, but repeated checks of his activities have uncovered no suspicious activities. Consequently he has been cleared up to and including TOP SECRET.

  5. Conclusion: If Cavendish is a Soviet agent, he is a “deep agent,” assigned to do nothing for many years, until he has penetrated to a position of high trust and responsibility. Project JOVE may be that position.

  TOP SECRET

  * * *

  CHAPTER 11

  Walking along the gravel path that skirted the long rows of silvery radio telescope antennas, Kirill Markov pulled his fleece hat down over his tingling ears and reflected on how much of the Russian spirit is shaped by the Russian climate.

  A melancholy people in a bleak land that suffers a dreary climate, he told himself.

  He stopped and surveyed the scene. Endless vistas of flat, snow-covered country, with hardly a hillock to break the monotony. Heavy, dull gray clouds pressing down like the hand of a sullen god. A cold wind moaning constantly, without even a tree to catch it and offer a lighter, cheerier sound.

  Why did they have to build this research station out here in the steppes? Why not by the Black Sea, where the commissars have their summer dachas and the sun shines once in a while?

  He shook his head. Admit it, old boy. If you were getting somewhere with this puzzle they’ve handed you, you wouldn’t mind the scenery or the climate so much.

  It was the truth. The radio pulses had him stymied. If they were a language, or even a code, he had not been able to make the slightest dent in it during the months he’d been working on the problem.

  Wearily, he turned in his tracks and started trudging back toward his living quarters. The wind tugged at his long overcoat. His feet were freezing.

  And the radio pulses were as much a mystery to him as they had been when he had first tackled the problem.

  He was walking past the gray cinder block of the administration building when Sonya Vlasov’s bright, high voice caught him.

  “There you are, Kir! I was wondering where you’d gotten to.”

  Inwardly he groaned. Sonya had been an easy conquest, if conquest was the correct word to use with someone so willing. Willing? She was demanding. Markov had a notion that their long nights together in bed had something to do with his inability to crack the Jovian puzzle. She was young, frighteningly energetic, athletic and more inventive than a team of Chinese acrobats.

  She rushed up and grabbed his arm. “Have you forgotten that the laboratory director has invited you to tea this afternoon?”

  It was already getting dark. The lights atop the buildings and along the paths had been switched on. Markov felt cold and utterly bleak deep inside his soul.
Incredibly, Sonya was smiling, bouncy and coatless. She wore nothing more than a sweater, loose-fitting slacks and boots.

  Her sweater was not loose-fitting, though, and despite himself Markov felt a tiny glow within. He smiled down at Sonya’s round, happy face.

  “Yes, I had quite forgotten about the invitation. Where would I be without you?”

  She laughed. “In bed with one of the other girls. They’re all very jealous of me, you know.”

  “Ah, my angel of mercy,” he said, sliding an arm across her shoulders. “You are too kind to me. After all, I’m a doddering old man…”

  “You are not!”

  “Well, middle-aged, then,” he said as they headed toward the wood-frame building where his room was. “There are so many younger men who are sighing and moaning for a chance to bask in your smile. Yet you concentrate all your energies on me.”

  And come to think of it, he added mentally, there are indeed other women who’ve been kept away from me by this over-developed sex maniac.

  But Sonya would have none of it. She was single-minded in her devotion to Markov. And, sure enough, he ended up making love to her again before he started out for the director’s tea. It came as no surprise to him. As he lay half dozing in her soft, ample breasts, he found himself trying to count how many times he had done it over the past two months.

  I must be close to a world record for a man approaching fifty years of age, he marveled.

  The director’s tea was very private, very quiet, and mercifully brief. Markov chatted amiably about his studies of oriental languages while the rest of the men and women talked about astronomy and electronics. He didn’t understand them and they didn’t understand him. No one spoke about the radio pulses from Jupiter, because they were supposed to be a secret that only a half-dozen people in the entire station knew about. And no one knew who, among the two dozen guests at the tea, might be reporting conversations back to Moscow.

  Markov wasn’t hungry by the time the partygoers bade farewell to their host and headed for their own quarters. He trudged listlessly past the cafeteria building and headed to his room. Sonya would be there, waiting in bed for him.