Voyagers I

by Ben Bova

  “No, of course not,” he muttered.

  “Those antennas”—his wife pointed, her other hand still clutching the seat arm in a death grip—“were once radars, to observe the re-entry of test missiles fired from California.”

  “Yes, so they told us.”

  “They have been adapted to observe the alien spaceship,” she said.

  “Umm,” muttered Markov as he put the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus.

  There was no sign of natives at all. No one gathered at the airstrip to welcome them. No dark-hued girls with garlands of flowers to drape around their necks and kiss them on both cheeks. Nothing down there but efficient machines and businesslike Americans and that peculiarly American artifact—house trailers.

  He pictured Sonya Vlasov’s face in his mind’s eye and wondered what she was doing now, in Kharkov, in a tractor factory. How she would have loved to come here! Markov realized. There must be something I can do to help her, some way I can get Maria to remove the blot she’s placed on her record.

  He glanced back at his wife as the plane lurched into its final approach. The landing gear went down, filling the cabin with a rushing, roaring sound that startled the old man drowsing across the aisle from them into a wide-eyed, frightened awakening.

  She says that she will not let me out of her sight for a moment, Markov thought. Very well. I will be the perfect husband. I will charm her as she’s never been charmed before.

  But the look on Maria’s face did nothing to encourage him. She was staring straight ahead, stolidly refusing to show fear as the plane shuddered and slewed through the gusting cross winds on its approach to the airstrip. Waves rushed by outside the window.

  Markov remembered those furious few moments back in their apartment, the triumphant look on Maria’s face when she announced Sonya’s fall from favor, her loss of her student’s status, her transfer to a factory.

  And he remembered the stark hatred he felt in his own heart. It won’t be easy to woo her, he told himself. But it must be done; that girl shouldn’t suffer on my account.

  A blur of palm fronds startled Markov and then the plane’s wheels screeched on the cement runway, bounced sickeningly, hit again and rolled the length of the airstrip. The engines roared with thrust reversers out and all flaps extended full.

  As the plane slowed and trundled off the runway, heading toward the single building of the airport’s terminal, the color began to come back to Maria’s cheeks.

  Turning to Markov, she whispered, “You remember the American who wrote to you, Stoner?”

  He nodded.

  “You must find him and befriend him. He trusts you.”

  “And I am to betray his trust. Is that it?”

  Maria scowled at him, her old self again. “You are to do what is necessary, whatever that may be.”

  Markov sighed and knew he would do what she told him to. That’s a surer way of wooing her than plying her with kisses, he realized.

  * * *

  YUKON TERRITORY

  George Umaniak stowed his rifle under the blankets in the back of the skimobile. Even though he had not even seen a caribou, the white policemen would give him a hassle if they discovered he had been out with a hunting gun.

  The wind was picking up, coming down in a cold moaning sigh from the frozen mountains. The sky was dark again, and the wind spoke of ghosts and the dance of the dead. George pulled up the hood of his parka, shivering.

  The damned skimobile was slow to start. He twisted the ignition key hard, several times, but the motor refused to catch. George swore to himself. It couldn’t be the battery, he had checked it just the day before.

  A flicker of light across the growing darkness caught at the corner of his eye. George looked up and saw the aurora shimmering over the mountains. Green, palest pink, ghostly yellow, the Northern Lights danced over the mountaintops in rhythm with the moaning wind.

  George swallowed hard and finally got the motor to cough itself to life. He opened the throttle all the way and raced homeward. This was no night to be out in the cold and dark.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 20

  The lecture hall was about half filled. It had originally been a movie theater for the military personnel of Kwajalein, and Stoner found himself hoping they would show films in it again. But this evening it was a lecture hall, a gathering place, a social focus for the scientists and technicians of Project JOVE.

  Nearly a hundred and fifty men and women sat uncomfortably on the government-issue metal folding chairs. Jeff Thompson sat next to Stoner, in one of the rearmost rows. Jo Camerata was nowhere in sight. Big Mac and Tuttle were down in the front row, within one step and a hop of the speaker’s podium.

  The buzzing of scores of conversations died away as McDermott climbed heavily up onto the little platform at the front of the hall. Cavendish stepped spryly up alongside him, carrying his own chair. He opened it and sat down behind McDermott, who leaned ponderously on the shaky little podium. An older Russian came up alongside Cavendish and took the chair that had already been placed there.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” Big Mac’s rasping lecture-hall voice was met by a shrill scream of feedback from the microphone.

  He glared at the audio technician sitting off to one side of the room behind a deskful of black boxes, while everyone else winced at the loudspeakers set into the rafters of the hall’s wooden ceiling.

  “Mac doesn’t need a microphone, for god’s sake,” Stoner muttered. Thompson grinned and nodded.

  McDermott used the microphone anyway, which amplified his voice into a booming, echoing thunder that rattled the walls of the building. He introduced Academician Zworkin, the astronomer who headed the Russian team. The old man—gray thinning hair, grayer pallor to his face, rumpled gray suit despite the heat—got slowly to his feet and came to the podium. He pulled the goosenecked microphone down to his own level.

  “Thank you, dear Professor McDermott,” he said in a high, thin, singsong voice. His English was quite good: the accent was from Oxford.

  Addressing the seated crowd, Zworkin said, “Although I have attended two of the SETI conferences over recent years, I am far from being an expert on extraterrestrial intelligence. But then, who is?”

  A polite murmur of laughter rippled through the audience.

  “My own field of specialization is planetary astronomy. I am not an astrophysicist or an astrochemist. I am, if such a word is possible, an astro-geologist. I am not quite sure what I am doing here, among you, except that I was too old and slow to avoid being picked for this job.”

  The audience laughed once again, but Stoner realized, He’s warning us not to expect any great ideas out of him. He’s beyond his depth here and he wants to get back home as soon as possible.

  Zworkin then began introducing each of the fifteen Russian scientists. All but one of them were men, although several of them were accompanied by their wives. Who were pointedly not introduced.

  A lanky, gangly Russian stood up, looking slightly flustered and boyish despite his scraggly, graying beard. Zworkin introduced him as Professor Kirill Markov, of the University of Moscow, a linguist.

  He’s the one I wrote to! Stoner realized. I’ve got to talk with him.

  The introductions finished, McDermott took over the podium again.

  “We’re going to be working together on this project for some months,” he said in the tones of a high school football coach. “I’d like to ask Dr. Cavendish to summarize where we stand right now.”

  Cavendish smiled his way to the podium.

  “Right,” he said, like a ritual throat-clearing. “I haven’t prepared any slides or graphs…thought that we’d all be digging into the details quickly enough.” He hesitated a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. “The, ah…object that entered the solar system last summer and engaged in a rather lengthy flyby of Jupiter, is now approaching Earth. It has been accelerating as it comes toward us, and our current projection is that it w
ill reach its nearest distance to Earth on or close to fifth July.”

  “The acceleration,” one of the Russians asked, “is this normal—I mean, natural?”

  “Quite. In essence, the object is falling freely as it comes closer to the Sun, you see, and the solar gravitational pull is accelerating it. No, it has not shown any signs of life or purpose since it left Jupiter’s vicinity and altered its course to head our way.”

  “Then it is inert now?”

  “Dead as a rock, as far as we can tell,” Cavendish said. “It’s just coasting along.”

  “What size is it?”

  “Any data about its shape?”

  “Surface brightness?”

  Cavendish held up both his long-fingered hands to stop the questions from coming faster than he could answer them.

  “Well, it’s rather larger than a breadbox…”

  The Americans in the audience laughed. The Russians exchanged puzzled glances with each other.

  “Actually,” Cavendish went on, “we don’t know very much as yet about its true size, mainly because we haven’t a firm fix on its intrinsic brightness. If it’s made of highly reflective material, then it must be rather small—on the order of a hundred meters or less.”

  “What is the maximum size it could be?”

  Cavendish hiked his eyebrows and searched through the audience for help. “Anyone care to make an educated guess?”

  Stoner called out, “It can’t be more than a few hundred meters across, at most. From the mass measurements we made during the Jupiter encounter, it must be very small, with negligible mass—about what you would expect if you put three or four Salyut or Skylab space stations together.”

  Zworkin turned in his chair. “Then it is large for a spacecraft.”

  “But tiny in comparison to an asteroid or even a very minor meteor,” Stoner said.

  “I see.”

  Cavendish tapped the microphone and all eyes focused back on him. “The object is still too far out for accurate radar measurement of its size, although within the next few weeks it should get close enough for a go at it.”

  “Why not use the Goldstone or Haystack radars?” someone asked.

  “Why not Arecibo?”

  McDermott got to his feet and said from where he stood, “Security. Our governments have agreed to keep this project as quiet as possible, to protect the people from undue shock and panic.”

  “We can track it with the Landau facility,” Zworkin said, his voice barely audible without the microphone.

  “Actually,” Cavendish broke in, trying to regain control of the discussion, “since the object is rushing toward us, all we need do is wait for a few weeks and we should be able to snap its photograph with Brownie cameras.”

  “One question on my mind,” said a woman—not one of the Russians—from her chair, “is this: how do we go about making contact with it?”

  “By radio, I should think,” Cavendish answered.

  “What about lasers?”

  “What wavelength should be used for the contact attempt?”

  Cavendish shrugged. “As many as we can, I suppose. We really have no idea of which wavelengths it communicates in.”

  “If any.”

  Stoner rose to his feet and said, “We ought to try to physically intercept it—go out and meet it, rendezvous with it, board it.”

  “I suppose we could consider that, of course.”

  But McDermott bellowed, “Out of the question! It’d take months to prepare a manned space shot, years, and this thing will whiz past us before we’d be ready. Besides…”

  “If we pushed hard,” Stoner countered, “we could set up a Space Shuttle launch in time.”

  “And what would we use for the upper stages,” McDermott taunted, “a slingshot?”

  “If we have to.”

  “Actually,” Cavendish stepped in, “I suppose we should attempt radio contact first, don’t you think?”

  Markov stood up, his slightly reddish face set in a puckish grin. He glanced back at Stoner as if he recognized him.

  “I am not a physical scientist,” he said, turning toward the podium. “However, in the question of communicating with the spacecraft, may I make a suggestion?”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Cavendish.

  “If you have made tape transcriptions of the radio signals issued from Jupiter during the spacecraft’s encounter with that planet, perhaps it would be useful to play these recordings back to the spacecraft as it approaches the Earth.”

  McDermott scowled. Cavendish knitted his shaggy brows together. “Play back the radio pulses from Jupiter?”

  “Yes,” said Markov. “That would immediately tell the alien that we observed the radio pulses that he caused. It would immediately be recognizable to him as an artificial signal from our world.”

  “H’mm. Striking.”

  “What makes you think it’s a him?” a woman’s voice called out.

  “Shouldn’t we be more cautious?” Jeff Thompson said, getting to his feet beside Stoner. “I mean, maybe we ought to wait for it to signal us before we start bombarding it with radio waves or laser beams. It might not like being bathed in electromagnetic energy.”

  “If we wait too long,” Cavendish countered, “it just might sail right past us and leave the solar system entirely, just as Professor McDermott said.”

  “That’s why I think we should try to make physical contact with it,” Stoner said, still on his feet. “If it’s unmanned we could even try to capture it and bring it into an orbit around the earth.”

  “Absolutely not!” McDermott snapped.

  “Why so?” asked Cavendish.

  “Too risky. Too many unknowns. It’s one thing to make radio contact, we’ve got the equipment and personnel for that. We are not going to play space pirates—boarding and seizing an extraterrestrial spacecraft. If they want to put that thing in orbit around Earth, they’ll do it themselves.”

  “So what’ll happen,” Stoner said, his voice rising, “is that we’ll spend the next few months trying to get an answer out of it, and it’ll sail right on past us and out of the solar system forever. Why wave bye-bye to it when we might be able to get our hands on it?”

  “It might not want to be captured,” somebody said.

  Cavendish, leaning his elbows on the rickety podium, responded, “That’s assuming there’s a crew aboard, isn’t it?”

  “Or a smart computer.”

  “Damned smart computer, to take the bird across interstellar distances.”

  “We have no authority,” McDermott insisted, hunching his shoulders like a football player about to make body contact, “to attempt to intercept the spacecraft.”

  “Then get the authority,” Stoner insisted, “before it’s too late and the thing sails right on past us.”

  “We should try to establish radio contact first,” Zworkin said. “If there is a crew aboard…”

  “Of course,” Stoner agreed. “But let’s start making the necessary plans for a rendezvous with the bird.”

  McDermott’s face was getting splotchy with anger. “Do you have any idea of the magnitude of such a task?”

  Stoner let himself grin at Big Mac. “As the only experienced astronaut in this group, yes, I think I do.”

  “We don’t have time to play space cadet!”

  “You don’t have time for anything else. If that spacecraft just zips past us without our learning anything from it…”

  “We’ll make radio contact,” McDermott said.

  “And what happens if it doesn’t respond? What if we don’t hit the right communications frequency and it just ignores us?”

  Zworkin stood up and made a little bow toward McDermott, almost apologetically. “I believe the young man is correct,” he said, his singsong voice barely carrying back to the row where Stoner stood.

  McDermott started to reply, but the Russian went on, “We should, of course, be preparing to meet this alien craft in space and, if it is at all
feasible, to bring it back to Earth for careful scrutiny. I will recommend such a course of action to the Soviet Academy. Perhaps the Soviet Union can make rocket boosters and cosmonauts available, even if the United States cannot.”

  McDermott looked as if he was choking, but he managed to say, “I understand. And I will recommend to the White House that NASA be alerted to the possibilities of such a mission.”

  Stoner resumed his seat, but not before receiving a venomous glare from Big Mac.

  You’ve won the first battle, Stoner said to himself. But it’s going to be a long, dirty war.

  * * *

  OFFICE OF

  SENATOR WILLIAM PROXMIRE

  WISCONSIN

  For Release After 6:30 A.M. Thursday, February 16, 1978

  Senator William Proxmire (D-Wis) said Thursday, “I am giving my Golden Fleece of the Month award for February to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which, riding the wave of popular enthusiasm for ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ is proposing to spend $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to try to find intelligent life in outer space. In my view, this project should be postponed for a few million light years.”

  The Golden Fleece of the Month Award is given for the biggest, most ironic or most ridiculous example of wasteful spending for the month. Proxmire is Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over NASA funds.

  “NASA is proposing to pay $2 million this year and $14 to $15 million over the next seven years to Pasadena, California’s, Jet Propulsion Lab to conduct ‘an all-sky, all-frequency search for radio signals from intelligent extra-terrestrial life.’ But this is only the foot in the door. Under the heading of ‘broad objectives’ the Jet Propulsion Lab proposal indicates that the purpose of the study is to:

  Build an observational and technological framework on which future, more sensitive SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) programs can be based.