Voyagers I

by Ben Bova

  CHAPTER 29

  Reynaud sat on the edge of Schmidt’s bed, tense as a crackle of electricity, staring at the young astronomer.

  For more than an hour now, Schmidt had been sitting on the floor in a corner of his room in the BOQ, arms hanging slackly from his shoulders, hands limp on the bare wooden flooring, eyes glazed and staring at nothing.

  He looked dead, except for the rapid, panting rise and fall of his chest and the puffing, almost wheezing breath from his open mouth.

  Reynaud had tried to talk to the youngster, tried cold water, even slapped his face. Schmidt just sat there and stared, glassy-eyed.

  If I call for medical help they’ll lock him up, Reynaud thought. God knows where he’s gotten the drugs. What if he doesn’t pull out of this? What if he dies?

  For the hundredth time, Reynaud got up and went as far as the door. Perhaps there is a doctor who would treat him without letting the authorities know, he told himself.

  But his hand refused to turn the doorknob.

  As he turned back toward the astronomer, Schmidt’s hands slowly clenched into white-knuckled fists.

  “I can see it,” he said, his voice hoarse from the dryness of his throat.

  Thank God, Reynaud thought. He’s coming out of it.

  “It’s coming,” Schmidt croaked. “Oh, Jesus God, it’s coming right at me! It’s coming!”

  He scrambled to his feet. Reynaud went toward him, feeling small and helpless next to the youngster.

  “It’s coming at me!” Schmidt screamed. “The colors…” He flung an arm across his eyes. “The pain!”

  “No, no, you’ll be all right,” Reynaud said, reaching for the younger man’s other hand.

  But Schmidt flung him backward with a wild sweep of his arm. Reynaud hit the bed with the back of his legs and tumbled across it, landing with a painful thump on the floor on the other side.

  “I can’t stand it!” Schmidt screamed.

  He lifted the entire bed completely off the floor, raising it over his head. Reynaud knew he was going to die. He couldn’t move. For a terrifying instant Schmidt loomed over him like an Aztec priest ready to rip the heart out of his chest.

  Then the young man, face twisted into an agonized mask of primeval fury, swung around and threw the bed as easily as a child throws a stick. The metal frame crashed against the wall, splintering the dresser and chair, smashing the plasterboard like a bomb.

  Schmidt raced for the door, flung it open and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Reynaud on the floor, white-faced with pain and shock, one arm twisted under his body grotesquely.

  “It will never work,” Markov was saying.

  “Sure it will,” Stoner insisted.

  They were still at their booth in the Officers’ Club, drinking coffee now. Stoner’s head thundered. Markov looked bleary, gloomy, exhausted.

  Jo had gone to the cafeteria before it had closed and brought them back soggy sandwiches. Now, sitting beside Stoner, she said:

  “I think it could work. Dr. Thompson would help us, I’m sure.”

  Markov shook his head, just once; the obvious pain made him stop and close his eyes.

  “You’re worried that too many people have to be in on it,” Stoner said.

  “Yes,” Markov agreed, eyes still closed. “A faked message from our visitor would require the three of us, Thompson and at least two or three of the radio telescope technicians. Besides, don’t you think that men such as Zworkin and Cavendish are clever enough to recognize a faked message after a bit of study?”

  “That’s where you come in, old friend,” said Stoner. “Your job is to create a message that’ll keep them puzzled long enough for us to get the rendezvous mission going.”

  Markov opened his eyes and smiled sadly at them. “I see. It all depends on me.”

  “A lot of it does.”

  “Will you try?” Jo asked him.

  The Russian pursed his lips, then smiled at her. “For you, beautiful one, I would dare anything. Why not? It will be a challenge. And if we are truly revolutionaries, we must take some risks, mustn’t we?”

  Despite his own headache, Stoner saw that Markov was humoring them both. The Russian had no faith in the desperate scheme. But he raised his coffee cup to Markov.

  “To our revolution,” Stoner toasted.

  Markov clicked his cup against Stoner’s. Jo added hers, saying, “To us.”

  Through a red wash of agony, Cavendish saw them bring Reynaud into the infirmary: two husky young sailors carried the stretcher with the fat little priest resting on it like a small beached whale in a black suit. Cavendish’s own pain made his vision blur; he couldn’t tell if Reynaud was conscious or not.

  “What…happened to him?” Cavendish’s voice was weak, hollow.

  The efficient middle-aged nurse who had been watching over him clucked her tongue. “Never you mind him. You just lay back there and rest.”

  Cavendish felt too weak to do anything else. But the pain was getting worse, not better. It had been a mistake to come to the hospital when the pain had started. Now he was trapped in here, and the waves of torture were racking his whole body, despite the analgesics the doctors had pumped into him.

  He knew where he had to be, what he had to do. He was being disobedient, and they were punishing him for it. As they should. He had been a fool to disobey. But now this American nurse was hovering over his narrow infirmary bed and he was too weak to fight his way past her.

  If she would just go away for a minute or two, Cavendish thought. Just long enough to let me slip away.

  The young doctor who had given him the injection stepped into the little curtained alcove.

  “How’s he doing?” he asked the nurse.

  “Restless.”

  Turning to Cavendish, the doctor put on a professional smile. “Still feeling some discomfort?”

  Discomfort? Cavendish thought. Why can’t they say the word pain?

  “I’m…I feel somewhat better,” he lied, knowing that the doctor expected such an answer.

  “Good. You just try to relax. Migraines don’t last forever.”

  “The…man they just brought in,” Cavendish managed to gasp out. “Was that…Dr. Reynaud?”

  The doctor nodded. “Yes. Fell down and broke his arm.”

  “It’s busy tonight,” the nurse said. “Some nights you just sit here, bored to death. But tonight’s busy.”

  “And it’s not even payday,” the doctor said.

  Cavendish let his head sink back onto the pillow and ground his teeth together to keep from crying out with the pain. The doctor left, but the nurse went no further than the end of the curtains framing Cavendish’s bed.

  A terrific clatter and roar of shouting voices suddenly erupted from somewhere beyond the curtains.

  “For Chrissake, hold him down!”

  “Gimme a hand!”

  “Orderly! Nurse! Come on, quick…”

  And over it all, the screaming, screeching voice of a…what? Cavendish couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Or a beast.

  The nurse disappeared. Cavendish could make out the sounds of struggle, fighting. Bodies flailing and thumping against walls and floor. A pair of burly orderlies raced past his curtained bed. Then the same doctor who had treated him.

  “Hold him, hold him!”

  Every muscle in his body fluttering from the effort, Cavendish slowly, excruciatingly, pulled himself up to a sitting position. They hadn’t taken his clothes off, just his shoes. Getting to his feet nearly made him faint. Reaching down to pick up his shoes was an agony of effort.

  And through it all, the melee out in the hallway continued.

  In his stocking feet, Cavendish stepped to the edge of the curtains and peered out into the hall. A tangle of bodies thrashed on the floor by the hospital’s main entrance, orderlies and nurses struggling to hold down a single young blond man who battled them all with rabid, insane ferocity.

  One doctor, armed with a hypodermic, was tryi
ng to plant his knees on the young man’s chest. Another—the doctor who had treated Cavendish—was attempting to stick a needle into one of his thrashing legs.

  Good Lord, Cavendish thought with a shock of sudden recognition, that must be young Schmidt! But it was hard to tell; the man’s face was contorted into that of a wild animal.

  Cavendish gaped, almost forgetting his own pain, for several moments. Then he slipped away down the hall, heading for the hospital’s rear entrance, carrying his shoes in one hand like a husband sneaking home to his angry wife after staying away too long.

  Jo was holding his arm as Stoner came out of the Officers’ Club. Markov stood on his other side, beneath the naked light bulbs that illuminated the club’s sign. Thousands of insects buzzed and hovered around the lights, trying in their mindless, instinctual way to understand its mystery.

  The lights went out abruptly.

  “I had no idea it was so late,” Stoner said. “We closed the joint.”

  “It’s midnight,” Jo said. “They close at midnight.”

  Stoner took a deep breath of sea air. It was cool and seemed to cut through the fog in his head.

  “Well, my fellow revolutionaries,” he heard himself say, “what do you think our chances are?”

  “We can do it,” Jo answered immediately.

  Markov’s reply was slower, “I will need a few days to create a suitably confusing set of signals.”

  “But what chances of success do we have?”

  The Russian tugged at his beard. “Practically zero,” he admitted. Then, with a boyish grin, “But the difference between zero and practically zero is the margin of all successful revolutions.”

  “We’re all crazy, you know,” Stoner said.

  “Not crazy. Drunk, certainly. But not crazy.”

  “We can do it,” Jo repeated, grasping Stoner’s arm more tightly. “Big Mac isn’t that smart; he’ll fall for it. He’ll probably have a heart attack but he’ll fall for it.”

  “That’s a fringe benefit I hadn’t thought about,” Stoner said grimly.

  “I’ll talk to Dr. Thompson about it first thing tomorrow morning,” Jo said.

  “Thompson,” Stoner echoed.

  Nodding, she said, “He’s the key to this whole plan. We’ve got to get him to go along with us.”

  “He won’t do it,” Stoner said.

  Jo answered, “I think I can talk him into it.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, then walked down the three wooden steps from the club’s doorway to the coral-cement paving of the sidewalk.

  “Skip it,” he said.

  “What?”

  Turning back to face Jo and Markov, Stoner said, “Forget the whole idea. I’m not going through with it.”

  Markov’s face fell. “But it was your idea!”

  “I know. But it’s no good. Forget about it,” he said.

  Stepping down to his side, Jo said, “Keith, if you’re worried about Jeff and me…”

  “I’m not worried about anything,” he snapped. “But I’m not going to fake data. That’s a scheme that only a drunk would even think of.”

  And, abruptly, he turned and walked off toward the BOQ. Jo stood at the base of the steps and watched him disappear up the shadowy street.

  Markov went to her. “I never believed he would go through with it,” he said gently. “It was merely wild talk, to get over his disappointment about Professor McDermott’s intransigence.”

  But Jo said, “No. That’s not the real reason. He won’t tell us his real reason. He won’t even admit it to himself.”

  Markov put a hand lightly on her shoulder. “Dear child, I know how you must feel.”

  “How could you?”

  “I know what a broken heart feels like.”

  Jo shook her head. “And I thought mine was shatterproof.”

  “None of them are,” Markov said. “The best you can hope for is some quick-setting cement to put the pieces back together again.”

  With a rueful grin, Jo said, “Quick-setting cement? And here I thought you were a romantic.”

  Markov put his arm around her shoulders and started walking her along the street. “Come, I will escort you to the hotel.”

  Jo let him lead her. She only turned once to look down the street in the direction Stoner had taken.

  In the darkness of her bedroom, the baleful red light of the electronics unit stared at Maria like a devil’s unwinking evil eye.

  He’s an old man, she told herself. I can’t keep it on maximum power for long; he’ll collapse and die on me.

  She was about to turn the power dial down when she heard a strange shuffling, dragging sound outside the window. Looking out toward the street, she saw Cavendish moving like a zombie, up the porch steps, to her front door.

  Maria glanced at her wristwatch. The luminous dial was fuzzy, the hands indistinct. With an impatient huff, she leaned across the bed and turned the power dial down to minimum. The eyes are getting worse, she thought as she got to her feet. I will need stronger lenses soon.

  Smoothing her dress, she went into the living room and unlocked the front door to admit Cavendish. He was standing there obediently, like a dog or a stolid cow, waiting to be allowed to enter.

  Maria kept the lights off. She didn’t want to see the Englishman’s face. He went to a chair, collapsed into it with a soul-wrenching sigh.

  “Your shoes,” Maria saw in the dim light from the street. “Why are you holding your shoes?”

  “I was in the infirmary,” he answered.

  “Why there?”

  Slowly, Cavendish began to tell her what had happened to him, how he had tried to outwit his just punishment by going to the American hospital.

  “How did you get away?” Maria asked.

  He told her about the hubbub with Schmidt.

  “Everyone knows he’s been popping drugs,” Cavendish said in his flat, machinelike tone, “but apparently he’s taken a serious overdose of something very powerful. He was like a madman. A berserker.”

  A berserker. The phrase caught in Maria’s mind. A berserker. Certain narcotics can turn an ordinary young astronomer into a mindless fighting machine.

  In the darkness, she smiled. Now I know how to stop Stoner, she thought. And it won’t even hurt Cavendish. For some strange reason, she felt relieved by that thought.

  * * *

  God elevated the forehead of Man and ordered him to contemplate the Stars.

  OVID

  * * *

  CHAPTER 30

  The rally began at eight, but the powerful lights of RFK Stadium were already blazing when the first eager people arrived to begin filling up the huge oval.

  Willie Wilson wiped a bead of nervous perspiration from his upper lip as he saw the seats filling up under the still-bright early evening sky of Washington.

  “I told you it’d be a sellout,” his brother Bobby said, smiling. “We’ll be turning ’em away at the gates in another half hour.”

  By the time the warm-up bands and singers and guest stars had prepared the huge, sellout throng, it was fully night, even though no one could see the sky through the overpowering glare of the stadium lights.

  Willie’s entrance was carefully, dramatically staged. All the stadium lights were to go out except for the single spot that would pick him up as he stepped out of the entrance ramp and onto the turf. Then the spot would follow him as he walked—magnificently alone—the length of the runway and up the steps to the platform where the microphone stood waiting for him.

  No matter how many audiences he spoke to, no matter how many times he delivered his message to the people, Willie still felt that sick, fluttery queasiness in his gut the last few seconds before he went out.

  Behind him, he could hear Bobby crowing to Charlie Grodon, “I told you it’d be a sellout crowd, didn’t I?”

  “This time,” Charlie agreed reluctantly. “But what about Anaheim? From what I hear the tickets ain’t moving so fast out there.”
/>   Willie shut their voices out of his mind. They were not important. Nothing was important except convincing that crowd out there that his message was worth listening to.

  He stood poised tensely as a young bronco about to be let out of its chute as the ex-singer turned proselytizer raised her voice in praise of him. Willie felt the clammy sweat oozing from his pores as she shouted into the microphone:

  “…THE MAN YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING TO SEE,” the loudspeakers bellowed, “WITH THE MESSAGE YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING TO HEAR—THE URBAN EVANGELIST HIMSELF, WILLIE WILSON!”

  The combined bands struck up a fanfare, the lights faded and died, and the crowd roared.

  Then choked into silence.

  In the lone spotlight, Willie halted in the middle of a loping, athletic stride.

  Silence. As if the whole stadium had disappeared. As if he’d been whisked away into the darkness of interplanetary space.

  Confused, bewildered, scared, Willie halted with the spotlight still dazzling his eyes. He could see nothing in the overpowering glare of that single light.

  But he heard gasps. Voices. Groans.

  “Look!”

  “My God, what can it be?”

  “Up there, look at the sky! Look at the sky!”

  Willie tried to shade his eyes but it did no good. There were screams now, strangled cries of…what? Fear? Awe? Terror?

  He took a couple of fast strides forward and the spotlight stayed where it was. Even the light’s operator had frozen.

  Willie looked up and saw it. Flickering in the sky. The message.

  The stadium was coming alive with sounds now. People were cursing, hollering, moving, jamming toward the exits, pulsing with the animal fear of a mindless mob.

  Willie raced for the platform. Even in the darkness his steps were unfaltering. He banged his shin on the first stair, gritted his teeth and made his way to the top of the platform.

  The mob was a living, breathing, mindless organism out there in the darkness. He could hear whimpers and screams and the bellowing of animal rage.

  His hands clutched the slim rod of the microphone.