by Ben Bova
Stoner spent his last afternoon on Kwajalein in a round of meetings with Thompson, Tuttle, the Russians, the full conference room of group leaders. Then, suddenly, he was back in his office alone.
He stood at his desk and surveyed the room. As impersonal as a telephone booth. One by one he opened the drawers of his desk. There was nothing in them that he needed, nothing that he wanted to take with him, nothing that was his.
Then his eyes lit on the absurd coconut resting beside the telephone. He broke into a slow grin.
“You,” he said to the shaggy brown lopsided sphere, “are going on a long, long journey.”
“I know it.”
Startled, he looked up and saw Jo leaning against the doorjamb.
His grin turned to embarrassment. “Uh…I’ve taken to talking to coconuts. Sign of nervousness, I guess.”
“You don’t look nervous to me,” Jo said, stepping into the office. She was wearing her usual cutoffs and half-unbuttoned blouse. Her skin was a deep olive brown. A quizzical smile touched the corners of her mouth.
“Iron self-control,” Stoner muttered.
“Are you all packed?” she asked.
“Just about. What about you? You’re not going aboard the plane in those clothes, are you?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I just thought I’d take one final stroll along the beach before dinner. Plenty of time to change and catch the plane.”
He nodded. “Well, I’m sure not going to miss the food here.”
She reached out for his arm. “Come on, take a walk with me. Let’s say good-by to the island together.”
They walked barefoot, arm in arm, along the wavelapped beach, toes digging into the warm sand, long shadows thrown ahead of them in the red glow of the dying day.
Out beyond the lagoon and the tiny fringe of islands rimming it, the sun was sinking into the ocean, turning the whole world the color of molten gold. Birds crossed the cloud-streaked sky, calling, calling.
“Our last sunset on Kwajalein,” Jo said, clasping Stoner’s arm in both of hers.
“We never got much of a chance to enjoy this beauty, did we?” he asked.
“There’s a lot we’ve never had a chance to do,” she replied. “A lot of living.”
“I know.”
“When this is over, Keith, when our lives settle down into something more ordinary…”
“Will they?”
“They’ve got to,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know. The alien changes everything so much…who can tell what’s going to happen?”
She turned and put her arms around him and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Keith, please don’t go through with it. I’m scared of this rocket mission.”
He breathed in the scent of her hair. “Scared? You? I thought you wanted to be an astronaut.”
“I wouldn’t be afraid if I was going,” she said. “But I’m scared to death for you.”
He laughed, but she could feel his body tense. “Reynaud thinks the Russians are out to kill me.”
“You see?” Jo pulled away slightly and looked into his eyes. “I’m not the only one.”
“I’ve talked to Kirill about it. It’s nonsense.”
“Did he say it was?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, sort of? Did he laugh it off or take it seriously?”
Stoner waggled a hand. “Kind of in between.”
“Keith, you are in danger from them. I can feel it.”
“I’m going to be a guest of the Russian Government. We all will be. They wouldn’t dare do anything.”
“You’re being stubborn,” she said. “And stupid.”
“Kirill’s going to look out for me.”
She raised her hands to the heavens. “Some bodyguard. He can’t even paddle a canoe!”
Stoner laughed.
“Don’t do it, Keith. Please. Let the Russians send their own cosmonauts to rendezvous with the alien. Stay on the ground with the rest of us.”
“No,” he said.
“Keith, I’m scared for you! I’m frightened!”
“I know you are,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m a heartless sonofabitch, okay? But this is more important to me than anything else. It’s my life. Can you understand that? More important to me than my kids, than you, than anything or anyone else. I’ve got to do it. I need to do it. I’d walk through fire to get to it.”
Jo said nothing. Her chin fell. She stared down at the sand at their feet.
“Am I wrong to feel this way? Am I some kind of monster?”
“Yes,” she answered softly. “You know you’re putting yourself in danger. But you turn your back on every human emotion, every human need. The only thing you want is to go out there and make this flight, even though you know they’re going to kill you over it.”
“What can I say?” he wondered. “So I’m a monster, after all.”
“Not a monster, Keith,” she replied. “A machine. An automated, self-programmed machine. I saw the way you battered Schmidt. He was an animal, but you were a machine. An inhuman, tireless, unemotional machine. Nothing can stand in your way. You drive over every obstacle, anything that gets in your way. Mac, Schmidt, the whole goddamned Navy…even your own children. None of us can hold you back.”
“That’s what you think of me?” Stoner’s voice was a strangled whisper. His insides felt cold and empty.
“That’s what you are, Keith,” Jo said, struggling to keep her own voice calm, untrembling.
For a long moment he said nothing. Then, “Okay. We’d better get back. I still have some packing to do.”
“Right. Me too.”
They walked in cold silence and Stoner left her at the entrance to the hotel. Jo watched him stride away, stiff with pride or anger or pain, and she realized that he did have emotions and vulnerabilities.
But he doesn’t care about me, she also realized. There’s no way that I can make him care about me.
Then she hurried inside, ran upstairs to her room and shut the door tightly behind her.
* * *
There can be little reasonable doubt that, ultimately, we will come into contact with races more intelligent than our own. That contact may be one-way, through the discovery of ruins or artifacts; it may be two-way, over radio or laser circuits; it may even be face to face. But it will occur, and it may be the most devastating event in the history of mankind. The rash assertion that “God created man in His own image” is ticking like a time bomb at the foundations of many faiths…
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Voices from the Sky
Harper & Row
1965
* * *
CHAPTER 38
The Ilyushin jet transport was noisy and uncomfortable despite the fact that only two dozen passengers rode in its cavernous cabin.
Stoner sat up front, staring out a window at the endless expanse of steppe: nothing but grass, as far as the eye could see. Not a tree, not a town, not even a village. This must be what the American plains looked like before the farmers covered it with corn and wheat, he thought.
The plane rode smoothly enough at this high altitude. If only the seats weren’t so crammed together, Stoner compained silently. The only rough part of the flight had been when they’d crossed the Roof of the World, passing close enough to Everest to see its lofty snow-plumed peak, then across craggy Tibet and the wild Altai Mountains. Stoner imagined that far off in the distance he could see Afghanistan, where the hill tribesmen still fought for the independence, as they had fought against the armies of Alexander the Great.
Across the cramped aisle from Stoner, Professor Zworkin snored fitfully. The others were scattered around the long cabin. Jo had taken a seat in the rear, he knew.
His stomach rumbled. Food service aboard the flight was nonexistent. They had been fed once when the jet had landed at Vladivostok, and then once again, many hours later, at the refueling stop near Tashkent. Neither
time had any of the passengers been allowed to step off the plane.
They had crossed the wild hill country where Kazakh horsemen still dressed in furs and conical felt hats and rode stubby ponies after their herds of sheep and goats. Now the grassland, the eternal steppe, with the city of Baikanur coming up and beyond it, the rocket-launching base of Tyuratam.
Stoner sensed someone leaning over him and turned in his seat. It was Markov, an odd little half-smile on his bearded face.
“We enter the country the same way our revered Lenin did, in 1917,” Markov said, nearly shouting to be heard over the thundering vibration of the jet engines.
“Lenin flew in?”
Markov lowered his lanky body into the seat next to Stoner’s. “No, the Germans sent him into Mother Russia in a sealed train. No stops, no one allowed on or off until it reached Petrograd. We fly in from the other direction, in a sealed airplane.”
Stoner tapped the window with a fingernail. “It’s a big country out there, your Mother Russia.”
“Oh, this isn’t Russia,” Markov corrected. “It’s Kazakhstan, a Federated Republic, part of the Soviet Union. But not Russia. These people are Asians…Mongols. Russia is another thousand kilometers to the west, on the other side of the Ural Mountains.”
“But it’s part of your country.”
Nodding, “Yes, just as Puerto Rico is part of the United States.”
Stoner looked out the window again. “Pretty damned big. And it looks untouched…raw.”
“Much of the Soviet Union is still virgin land,” Markov said. “It was Khrushchev’s dream to cultivate such lands, make them yield rich harvests.”
“What happened?”
Markov’s grin turned sardonic. “He was outvoted…while his back was turned.”
“Oh.”
“They allowed him a peaceful retirement, though. He died of natural causes. Very unusual for a Russian leader. A sign of our growing civilization.”
Stoner asked, “Are you laughing or crying, Kirill?”
With a shrug, Markov said, “Some of both, my friend. Some of both. I feel like a life-sentence prisoner returning to jail after a brief escape. It’s hateful, but it’s home.”
“I should’ve talked to you into staying at Kwajalein,” Stoner said, lowering his voice even though the drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything a few feet away.
“No, no,” Markov protested. “This is where I belong. This is where I should be.”
Stoner searched the Russian’s face. “You really believe that?”
Markov closed his ice-blue eyes and nodded gravely. “I have talked about it at some length with Maria. We are going to try to work things out between us. She will put in for a transfer to a…a less demanding job.” His boyish grin returned. “If I can make her more human, easier to live with, perhaps there is hope for the rest of the Russians as well.”
Stoner sensed there was much more going on in Markov’s marriage than the Russian was willing to talk about.
“In the meantime,” Markov went on, “all of us here will act as your bodyguard. You are part of us, and we are part of you. You will get to fly into space, never fear.”
“That’s all I ask,” Stoner said.
Markov’s face grew serious. “I know there has been talk about a Russian plot against you.”
“Kirill, I never thought that you or anyone among us…”
“Not to worry,” he said, raising a hand to silence Stoner. “I will be in communication with Academician Bulacheff the instant we land at Tyuratam. This project will go through without interference, I promise you.”
“Okay,” Stoner said. “Fine.”
“We are not pawns in some international power game,” Markov muttered darkly. “The government will treat us—all of us—with some respect.”
“Do you really think you can change the system that much, Kirill?”
Shaking his head slightly, Markov said, “It isn’t necessary to change the system, as much as it is to get the bureaucrats to return to the system, to use it honestly and fairly. The Russian people are a good, hard-working people. They have suffered much, endured much. We must return to the true principles of Marx and Lenin. We must return to the road that leads inevitably to a truly just and happy society.”
“That’s a big job,” Stoner said.
“Yes, but I have help,” Markov said. “Our alien is going to help me.”
“How?”
With an absentminded tug at his beard, Markov said, “Look at what the alien has already accomplished. Not merely for me, but for you as well. America and Russia are co-operating—in a limited way, to be sure, but co-operating in the midst of confrontations on almost every other front.”
Stoner countered, “Then why wouldn’t they let us off this airplane? They’re co-operating so well that they’re afraid we’d steal something if we set foot on their ground.”
“Do you realize how great a strain it is on our national paranoia to allow Americans to come to our premier rocket base? And two Chinese scientists?”
“I suppose so, but…”
“Our alien visitor has already forced all the governments of the world to change their habits of thought.”
“An inch,” said Stoner.
“Perhaps only a centimeter,” Markov granted, “but still it is a change. They can never think again of our world as the whole universe. They are being forced to work together to find out who this alien visitor is. Never again can we think of other human beings, other human nations or races, as being truly alien. Our visitor from space is forcing us to accept the truth that all humans are brothers.”
“Jesus Christ,” Stoner muttered. “Scratch a Russian and he bleeds philosophy.”
“Yes,” said Markov. “And pious philosophy, at that. But mark my words, dear friend. This alien will bring us all closer together.”
“I hope you’re right, Kirill.”
“It has already done so! It has made friends of us, hasn’t it?”
Stoner nodded.
“It has been a good friendship, Keith.” Markov’s eyes got watery. “I am proud to have you for a friend, Keith Stoner. You are a good man. If necessary, I would lay down my life for you.”
For several moments, Stoner didn’t know what to say. “Hey, Kirill, I feel the same way about you. But this isn’t the end of our friendship, it’s only the beginning.”
“I hope so.” Markov sighed. “But once we land, neither my life nor yours will be completely under our own control. Events will catch us up and carry us on their shoulders. And, certainly, I may never get the chance to leave Russia again, to see you or any other foreigners.”
The realization caught Stoner by surprise. He heard himself answer, “And I might never come back from the rendezvous mission.”
“Ah,” Markov said, “I hadn’t even thought about that possibility.”
Stoner took a deep breath.
“There is one thing I can promise you, though,” Markov said before Stoner could think of anything.
“What’s that?”
“You will get to go on the rendezvous mission. No one will stop you from going. That I promise.”
Stoner nodded and smiled and told himself, He means what he’s saying, but he’s got no way of keeping that promise.
Markov nodded back, eyes misting again, and wordlessly got up to head back to his own seat.
Turning back to the window to watch the endless empty steppe, Stoner soon drifted off to sleep. He was jolted out of the doze by the plane’s sudden lurching and the loud banging noise of the landing gear being lowered. The plane shuddered and banked hard over until the grassy ground seemed to tilt upward to meet them.
It sounded as if a gale was blowing through the cabin. As he pulled his seat belt tighter, Stoner saw that Zworkin, across the aisle, was very much awake now and clutching the arms of his chair with white-knuckled terror.
Then the plane straightened out, lurching and bumping through the early eve
ning twilight as the pilot lined it up for the final approach to the airfield. Stoner looked out the window and his jaw dropped open.
Tyuratam.
It was like the skyline of Manhattan, except that these were not buildings, but gantry towers. Steel spiderworks for holding and launching rockets. Miles of them! Stoner saw, gaping. One after another, a whole city full of rocket-launching towers. It made Cape Canaveral look like a flimsy suburban development, modest in scale and temporary in endurance. This was built to last. Like Pittsburgh, like Gary, like the acres upon acres of factories in major industrial centers, Tyuratam was a solid, ongoing, workaday complex of giant buildings, vast machines, hardworking people.
Their business was launching rockets Their industry was astronautics. The place was a port, like fabled Basra of the Arabian Nights, like modern Marseille or New York or Shanghai. Ships sailed out of this port on long, bellowing tongues of flame, heading for destinations in space, bringing back new riches of knowledge.
And someday, Stoner knew, they’ll bring back energy, and raw materials, and they’ll start building factories up there in orbit.
But for now they probed the uncharted seas of space for knowledge, for safe harbors where satellites could orbit and relay information back to Earth.
The plane edged lower. Stoner could see spotlights blooming around one launch pad, where a tall silvery rocket stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry tower.
That’s a Soyuz launcher, he realized. That’s the bird I’m going to fly on.
He did not notice, far off on the other side of the vast complex of towers and rockets, two other boosters standing side by side. They were painted a dull military olive-gray, and were topped by blunt-nosed warheads of megaton death.
* * *
Religion
CALMING THE FEARS OF GEHENNA
Rudolfo Cardinal Benedetto, his brown eyes bright and alert despite the man-killing schedule he’s been keeping, looked up at the glowing sky and actually smiled.
“Now we know that we are not God’s only creatures,” he said in the soft accent of his native Lombardy. “Now, if God grants it, we shall communicate with our visitor.”
