Voyagers I

by Ben Bova

  Stoner wanted to punch that leering, grinning old face. Instead he merely said, “I know.”

  “So she’s after me now. You’re out of her game plan.”

  Tuttle honked the horn once, lightly. McDermott started toward the car. Over his shoulder, he said to Stoner, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of her.”

  Stoner stood trapped in the doorway, unable to move, seething.

  * * *

  TOP SECRET—NO FOREIGN NATIONALS

  Memorandum

  FROM: V. J. Driscoll, ONM

  TO: Lt/Cdr F. G. Tuttle, ONR

  SUBJECT: Transfer of Project JOVE

  DATE: 5 January

  FILE: 84-662

  REF: ONM Log/vjd

  1. Planning phase of Project JOVE transfer is now complete.

  2. Logistic buildup at Kwajalein is under way, preparatory to reception of Project JOVE personnel and equipment by 15 April.

  3. Administrative responsibility for Kwajalein and adjoining facilities will be transferred to the Navy by 15 January.

  4. Port of debarkation for Project JOVE personnel will be Navel Air Station, South Weymouth, MA. All personnel will be airlifted by MAC in two (2) C-141 transports. MAC will provide a third C-141 or one (1) C-5A, as required, for equipment.

  5. It is imperative that all personnel and dependents be prepared to embark no later than 15 April. Facilities for dependents can be made available at South Weymouth NAS for Project JOVE families, if necessary.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  Sally Ellington kicked off her sensibly low-heeled shoes, reached across her cluttered desk and picked the phone receiver off its cradle. For a long moment she hesitated. Then, with a glance at the locked door that connected to the empty outer office, she quickly punched out his number on the phone’s keyboard.

  His voice sounded sleepy, grumpy, when he answered.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Sally.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Be quiet and listen,” the President’s science adviser commanded. “I’ve got something that will make your boss the next President.”

  No reply from the other end. I wonder if he’s alone in that waterbed of his? she wondered.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “The President’s decided to inform the Russians about…you know.”

  “JOVE?” he asked immediately.

  “Yes. He’s going to use the Hot Line.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “When that becomes public knowledge, his chances of winning next November are gone.”

  “I don’t know. He…”

  “I do know,” Sally Ellington said. “Better than you. He’s finished, if and when this news leaks to the press.”

  “So why are you telling me? If I tell the Secretary about it…”

  She smiled to herself. “That’s your decision to make. I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

  “I see.” His voice faltered momentarily, then, “I appreciate this, Sally. I owe you one.”

  She nodded, picturing in her mind how he would repay her. In that waterbed.

  In Massachusetts during the winter the sun sets by four o’clock. It was nearly six and as black as midnight outside the observatory windows as Jeff Thompson pored over the computer printouts that covered his desk.

  Jo Camerata sat alongside him, tracing with her finger a long column of numbers. Thompson could smell a trace of herbal scent in her dark hair. Her fingernail was unpainted, but carefully shaped.

  You’re a happily married man, Thompson told himself. Then he added, But you’re not dead!

  “I know the figures look screwy,” Jo was saying, “but that’s what the computer is spitting out at us. I ran through the program three times, just to be sure, and the numbers came out the same each time.”

  Thompson could feel the warmth of her body. She was almost rubbing her shoulder against his. Forcing himself to concentrate on the work in front of him, he asked, “And this is the latest run?”

  “Yes,” she said. “All this column is the data from the latest set of Big Eye photographs.”

  Thompson frowned at the numbers. It had been years since he’d been faced with a problem in orbital mechanics. Not since he had received his doctorate and gone to work at the observatory under McDermott’s direction had he been forced to calculate orbits and trajectories. That’s what graduate students were for: they did the dog work.

  But this latest batch of numbers churned out by the computer made no sense. It looked so crazy that he had to give it his personal attention.

  Thompson shook his head. “You’d better hand this set to Keith. It’s more in his line than mine.”

  Jo moved slightly away from him. “I’m not allowed to go up there anymore. Professor McDermott doesn’t want me to see him.”

  “You’re not a courier anymore?”

  “No. Mac doesn’t even want me to talk to him on the phone.”

  Pushing his eyeglasses back up over his brows, Thompson gave her a long look. “How do you feel about that? I thought you and Keith were, well…”

  Jo shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “You can’t even phone him?”

  She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “The phone at the house is tapped. Mac gets a record of all the incoming and outgoing calls.”

  “Jesus Christ, we might as well be in Russia.”

  Jo said nothing.

  “Well,” Thompson said, “I guess somebody else’ll have to deliver this can of worms to him.”

  “Or we could send it over the computer line,” Jo said softly. “He’s got a terminal up there at the house.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Am I doing something wrong?” Jo asked, looking back at the printouts. “Or is the computer glitching on us?”

  “Damned if I know. I’ll have to work all night on this to figure out what’s wrong,” Thompson said.

  “I must’ve made a mistake somewhere.” A gloomy note of self-criticism crept into her voice.

  “You’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  Thompson pushed his chair away from the desk slightly and straightened up from his usual hunched-over position. “Mac’s really leaning on you, huh?”

  Jo smiled sadly. “More than you know.”

  He could feel his blood pressure rising. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable.

  “It’s a shame Keith dragged you into his crackpot scheme. It wasn’t very smart, writing to the Russians.”

  “He didn’t tell them anything he wasn’t supposed to say!” she flared.

  “That’s not what the Navy thinks.”

  “He’s a good man,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody.”

  Thompson grinned at her. “Neither would Chamberlain.”

  “Who?”

  “Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who caved in to Hitler at Munich.”

  “Oh,” she said. “History.”

  Suddenly Thompson felt very old.

  They pored over the computer runs for another hour, but Thompson found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wanted to work on Jo, instead. Finally, with an enormous effort of will, he pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up.

  “Look, kid, you’d better go home. It’s going to take the rest of the night for me to figure out where the glitch is.”

  She looked concerned. “I’m willing to stay here and help you…”

  “No,” he snapped, a bit desperately. “Go on home. Get some sleep. I’m going to phone my wife and tell her to tuck the kids in and keep supper warm for me. I’ve got three kids, you know.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Okay. Off you go. See you tomorrow.”

  She got up from her chair, almost reluctantly, Thompson thought, and went to the door of his cubbyhole office. “I’ll check the data recorders downstairs before I go,” she said.r />
  “Fine. Good night, Jo.”

  He stared for a long while at the doorway after she left. Then he phoned home, but the line was busy. Nancy and her goddamned girl friends.

  He turned his full attention to the computer printouts, trying to get the vision of Jo out of his mind.

  But he heard her call, “Dr. Thompson!”

  Looking up from the desk, he saw that she was back at the doorway, her face a mixture of worry and surprise.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The signals,” Jo said, breathless with agitation. “They’ve stopped!”

  “What?”

  He bolted from his chair, barked his shin on the corner of the desk and hurried downstairs with her.

  The big room was strangely quiet. No one else was there; the night shift wouldn’t come on for another hour. The big electronics consoles hummed softly to themselves. The tracing pens were strangely still, inking out dead-straight lines on the graph paper that unrolled slowly beneath them.

  Thompson dashed around the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, found a headset and plugged it into the proper console.

  He clapped one earphone to the side of his head.

  Nothing.

  Only the background hiss of the universe, laughing at him. The radio pulses were gone.

  * * *

  This evening I witnessed one of the great political blunders of all time. The President revealed to the Premier of Soviet Russia, over the Hot Line, that we are working on making contact with the alien spacecraft we discovered in the vicinity of Jupiter.

  The Premier pretended not to be surprised: said his own scientists are working on the very same thing. The President suggested a joint program, sharing people, information, facilities. The Premier gave a jolly laugh and said he’d like that very much.

  He sure as goddamned hell would! And in the meanwhile, any shred of support the President had in Congress is going to bolt the Party when they find out he’s giving away our top scientific secrets to the Reds. In the name of peace and brotherhood!

  It looks now as if I’ll have no choice but to try to wrest the Party’s nomination away from him. I’ve got to take these primaries seriously; it’s the only hope for the Party in November.

  Private diary of the Honorable

  WALDEN C. VINCENNES, Secretary of State

  * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  Gritting his teeth against the pain, Cardinal Otto von Friederich began the long climb up the marble steps that led to the papal apartment. To the messengers and monsignors proceeding through the halls of the Vatican on the eternal business of Holy Mother Church, the cardinal seemed an austere, aloof symbol of majesty: silent and stately, slowed perhaps by age and arthritis, but the very picture of a Prince of the Church, with his pure white hair, ascetic angular features and swirling red robes.

  Cardinal von Friederich knew better. His power within the Vatican was illusory. This new Pope had no time for an old man wedded to the traditions and training of the past. His audiences with the Holy Father were strictly formal nowadays; his days of influence and true power were over.

  Silently he prayed the rosary as he climbed the cold marble stairs. The pain grew worse each day. It was a penance, of course, and he knew that God would not send him a Cross that he could not bear. Still, the pain raised a fine sheen of perspiration across his brow.

  An elderly monsignor, chalky-white as dust, met the cardinal at the top of the stairs and silently ushered him into a spare, chilly little room.

  Cardinal Benedetto was already there, of course, his red cape wrapped around his stocky body. Benedetto always reminded Von Friederich of a Turkish railway porter: squat and swarthy, almost totally bald even though he was nearly twenty years Von Friederich’s junior. But he was the Pope’s strong right arm these days, the papal Secretary of State, confidant and adviser of His Holiness. While Von Friederich’s position as head of the Propaganda Fide, had become little more than a sinecure for a dying old man.

  How different it had been in the old days, Von Friederich thought. All my life I have served Italian Popes and battled the Italians dominating the Curia. Now we have a Polish Pope, and the Italians have overwhelmed me at last.

  “My Lord Cardinal,” Benedetto said in Italian.

  Von Friederich inclined his head in the slightest of bows. Even that tiny movement caused him pain.

  The room was almost bare of furnishings. A small wooden desk, a few plain chairs. The only light came from the lamp on the desk. Out beyond the windows, the Vatican garden was already draped in the shadows of dusk.

  In the gloomy darkness, Von Friederich could see that the walls were covered with frescoes by Titian. Or perhaps Raphael. He never could tell them apart. Vatican wallpaper, he said to himself, keeping his distance from Cardinal Benedetto.

  Part of the painting on the wall he was facing—a congregation of saints piously praising God—suddenly swung away, revealing a door cunningly set into the wall. The Pope strode into the room, strong, sturdy, smiling at them both.

  The room seemed to brighten. The Holy Father was wearing white robes, of course. But despite himself, Von Friederich had to admit that it was His Holiness’ beaming, energetic features that charged the room with light. It was the open, rugged face of a worker, a common man elevated to greatness, the kind of face that might have been St. Peter’s. A fisherman, not an aristocrat. But he rules the aristocrats and the workers alike, Von Friederich knew.

  The cardinals knelt and kissed the papal ring. The Pope smiled and motioned for them to seat themselves.

  “Come, come,” the Pope said in Italian. “No formalities today. We have too much to consider.”

  Within moments they were deeply into a discussion of the strange radio signals from Jupiter that the American hierarchy had reported to the Vatican only the day before.

  “My scientific adviser,” said the Pope, “Monsignor Parelli, is beside himself with excitement. He believes this is the most wonderful thing to happen to mankind in two millennia.”

  “It is a danger,” said Von Friederich.

  “A danger, my brother?”

  Von Friederich’s voice had always been high, almost girlish. As a child he had fought many schoolyard battles because of it. Now he struggled to keep it calm, even, logical—and to keep his pain from showing in it.

  “When the news of this alien…thing…reaches the general populace—as it will, sooner or later—they will be stunned and fearful. Does Your Holiness recall the uproar some twenty-five years ago over Sputnik?”

  The Pope nodded. “Yes, but that was mainly in the West.”

  “It will be as nothing compared to the public reaction to news of an alien intelligence in our solar system. Who are they? What are they like? What do they want? Whom do they worship?” He hissed the last question in an urgent whisper.

  The Pope started to reply, then hesitated and stroked his broad chin thoughtfully.

  “I agree, Your Holiness,” said Cardinal Benedetto. “This alien presence could be a great danger to the faithful.”

  The Pope sat back in his chair and tapped his blunt fingertips on his knees.

  “It is a test,” he said finally.

  “A test?”

  He nodded. “A test of our faith, my brothers. A test of our courage, our intelligence. But most of all, a test of our faith.”

  “It could be so,” Benedetto quickly agreed.

  Von Friederich said nothing, but thought that the Italian was toadying again.

  “The Americans have discovered these radio signals and something they believe to be a spaceship, if I understand the information we have received,” the Pope said.

  Benedetto nodded. “Radio signals from the planet Jupiter, yes. And in space near the planet, an alien…artifact.”

  “Artifact!” The Pope smiled broadly. “An excellent word, Benedetto! A scientific word. Noncommittal. Unemotional. Excellent!”

  Von Friederich clamped his teeth together.

/>   “I believe,” the Pope went on, “that science leads to knowledge and therefore toward the perfection of man’s intelligence. This alien artifact”—he smiled again—“can help the scientists to learn more about the universe, and therefore to learn more about God’s works.”

  “Ah, I see,” said Benedetto. “If we can converse with these alien creatures, we have the opportunity to learn more of God’s handiwork, more about His creations.”

  The Pope nodded to him.

  “But Holy Mother Church has the responsibility of protecting her children from error and from danger,” Von Friederich said, as strongly as he could manage. “Especially from danger to their immortal souls.”

  Benedetto turned toward him. “I don’t see how…”

  “This space artifact,” Von Friederich said, feeling his voice weaken as he spoke, “will startle many of the faithful. Most of our flock still live in very backward regions of the globe: Latin America, Africa, Asia—even in parts of Europe and North America many Catholics have only a dim knowledge of the modern world. They fear modern science. They cling to their faith for support in their troubled lives.”

  “Of course,” said the Pope.

  “And their Church,” Von Friederich went on, “has always let them think that we are God’s creatures. We and we alone.”

  “But the Church has never denied the possibility of other creatures elsewhere in the universe,” Benedetto said.

  “Never formally denied,” Von Friederich pointed out. “But Holy Mother Church has never urged her children to prepare themselves for meeting other creatures from space, either.”

  “Quite true, my friend,” murmured the Pope. “Quite true. Even in Redemptor hominis I said that man has been given dominion over the visible world by his Creator.”

  “If the world is suddenly told that there are other intelligent creatures in space, from other worlds, other suns, and that they are in some physical ways superior to us”—Von Friederich closed his eyes to hide the pain—“the faith of many Catholics will be strained to the utmost.”