Voyagers I

by Ben Bova

  “It’s all finished,” Jo said.

  “Christ, I hate needles,” Stoner muttered.

  The technician smiled at them, his smile growing especially big for Jo, and then left. Stoner got to his feet, tested his legs.

  “Nothing. No effect at all.”

  “It will hit you soon enough,” Markov said. “You had better get into bed.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Markov toyed with his beard. “Keith…tomorrow you will be surrounded by others, technicians, doctors…you know.”

  Stoner nodded. Markov grabbed him by the shoulders and embraced him. Stoner pounded the Russian’s back with both hands and got the same treatment in return.

  “Good night,” Markov said, pulling himself away. “Good luck, my friend.”

  “Good night, Kirill.”

  Markov hurriedly left the room. Stoner turned. Jo was still standing there, between him and the bed.

  Stoner put out a hand to push the door shut, missed it, staggered a few steps.

  “Whoa…!” The room swayed.

  “Here, let me help you,” Jo said.

  “I can manage.” He gripped the open door, clung to it for a moment to steady himself, then pushed against it. It swung shut and he swung around to face her.

  “That must’ve been some shot he gave you,” Jo said. Her voice sounded far, far away.

  “Kid stuff,” Stoner said. He tried to snap his fingers, but it didn’t work.

  Somehow she was holding him, propping him up, walking him toward the bed. An infinite distance. Endless.

  “My last night on Earth,” Stoner mumbled. “I want to spend it with you.”

  “Sure you do,” she said.

  He was falling, gliding slowly, effortlessly, weightlessly toward the bed that stretched out so invitingly, so far below him.

  “My last night on Earth,” he repeated as he bounced on the squeaking, sagging mattress.

  “Yes, I know.”

  She was beside him and he held her close. She felt warm and the scent of springtime flowers buzzed through his brain.

  “We are stardust,” he told her.

  Her voice was a distant purr in his ear. “You told me that our last night on Kwajalein.”

  “A million years ago. Yes, I remember.”

  “Close your eyes, Keith. Sleep.”

  “I want to make love with you, Jo. I want you to make love with me.”

  Her soft laughter was like windchimes. He couldn’t hear the sadness in it. “Keith, you’re going to be unconscious in another minute.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m going to…” The words faded away as his eyes closed.

  Jo sat next to him for long moments, watching his face relax into deep, untroubled sleep. She kissed him lightly, and he smiled.

  “Say you love me, Keith,” she whispered to his sleeping form. “Tell me just once that you love me.”

  But he lay there sound asleep, smiling.

  Jo got to her feet, straightened her clothes, and went to the door. With one final look at him sleeping peacefully on the bed, she opened the door and left his room.

  * * *

  WICHITA

  “Harry, come on! You’re missing Walter!”

  “Walter? I thought he retired.”

  “He’s on for this. Hurry!”

  “Hold on. Hold on. Here I am. Turn up the sound.”

  “I swear you’re getting deaf. I swear it.”

  “If you’d shut up for a minute, maybe I could hear the darned TV!”

  “Don’t yell at me, Harry! First time Walter’s on all year and you have to start an argument.”

  “Just turn up the sound and sit down.”

  “…and for that story, we switch to Roger Mudd, in Moscow.”

  “It’s three A.M. here in Moscow, Walter, and the city is asleep. But the lights in the Kremlin offices where the upcoming space shot is being monitored are burning intensely…”

  “Is that happening now, Harry?”

  “Can’tcha see? It says, ‘Live by Satellite.’ ”

  “…and in the Russian cosmodrome of Tyuratam, final preparations for the rocket’s lift-off are being made in the glow of floodlamps…”

  “Is that a real Russian rocket?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Gee, it looks just like one of ours.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 40

  Maria Kirtchatovska Markova watched the sky slowly brighten with dawn as she lay wide awake beside her husband’s sprawled, sleeping form.

  Even with his beard and his hair turning silver, when he slept he looked like a baby: his face was unlined, except for the smile crinkles around the corners of his eyes, his mouth was open slightly, his breathing deep and regular.

  Her eyes burned with sleeplessness. All night long she had lain in bed, rigid with tension, worrying about the future. The American was doomed, she knew that. He was nothing more than a pawn in the power struggle taking place within the Kremlin. But if Stoner was a pawn, Maria herself—and Kirill—were even less. They could both be swept away with the brush of a careless hand.

  I must protect him, she knew. I must protect us both.

  Slowly, carefully, she lifted the bedcovers enough to slip out of bed. The floor felt cold to her feet, but she barely noticed it. She went to the window, felt the summer sunlight warm on her face.

  “Maria?” Markov’s sleep-fogged voice called.

  She didn’t answer.

  “What are you doing?”

  Turning, she saw that he was sitting up in the bed. His faded green nightshirt was twisted ludicrously around his torso, but the sight brought no laughter to Maria’s lips.

  “I’m watching the sunrise,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful.”

  Markov reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, lighting it. “Why are you up at this ungodly hour?”

  She shrugged. There was no sense talking to him about it. He would only get angry and climb up on his high horse and make silly pronouncements.

  Markov got out of bed and came to the window beside her.

  “You haven’t slept all night, have you? Your eyes are all red.”

  “They launch the rocket this morning,” she said.

  “Yes.” Markov puffed on the cigarette and gazed out the window. From this side of the building the launching pad couldn’t be seen.

  “Strange to think,” he went on, “that Stoner will be safer once he’s in space than he’s been on the ground.”

  Maria said nothing.

  Her husband mused, “At least there are no assassins in outer space.”

  She still said nothing.

  He looked down at her, his eyes searching. “Maria Kirtchatovska, he will be safe in that rocket, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” she answered automatically. “Of course.”

  Taking her by the shoulders, Markov said in a near whisper, “Maria, he is my friend. I don’t want any harm to come to him.”

  “There’s nothing I can do to harm him,” she said.

  “But you can help him.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Is he still in danger, Maria?”

  She pulled away from him.

  But he grabbed her again, harder. “Maria! If there’s any chance at all for us to live together, you must be honest with me. Is he still in danger?”

  “It’s not in our hands, Kirill,” she said, trying to avoid his eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “About what?” His voice was becoming frantic.

  “I don’t know!” she said, pleading. “The decisions that are being made—Kirill, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it! It doesn’t concern us!”

  “Yes, it does!” His voice was so intense it cut through her. “If you let them kill Stoner you’re also letting them kill us.”

  “Kir, I can’t…”

  “What are they going to do?” he demanded.

  “
I don’t know.”

  “But they are going to do something?”

  “There are…factions, at the very highest levels of authority.”

  “You must find out what they plan to do, Maria. Before we let him get into that rocket!”

  “It won’t be the rocket,” she said. “That much I know. They don’t want the rocket launch to fail, not in front of worldwide television coverage.”

  “Then what?”

  “How can I know, Kir? If I even hinted at trying to find out, it could mean…I can’t do it, Kir. I can’t.”

  He circled his arms around her and held her close. Instead of bellowing, his voice became gentle, almost passionate. “You must, Maria. It’s the only hope for us, for all of us. You must find out what they plan to do to him. And quickly.”

  Their voices woke Jo. She couldn’t make out words through the thin walls separating the second-floor rooms, but she could tell from the rhythms of the voices that it was Russian being spoken. Heatedly.

  Jo showered and dressed quickly. It wasn’t until she stood in front of the foggy mirror over her sink to put on lipstick that she realized her hands were trembling.

  She was the first downstairs in the common room. The cook and her helper—both pale-skinned Russians, wives of technicians—had already set the table for breakfast and filled the kitchen with the steamy aroma of hot cereal, eggs, ham and the thin, limp local equivalent of crepes.

  Markov came downstairs, looking as tense as a bow-string pulled taut, followed by his dumpy, sour-faced wife. Jo realized it was their voices that had awakened her. In a few minutes the two Chinese scientists came down, then Zworkin and two of his aides. No one spoke much. Anxiety crackled through the air like high-voltage electricity.

  Jo couldn’t eat. She sipped at a cup of coffee as the team from the launch complex pulled up outside in their van. A half-dozen technicians in white coveralls clumped into the common room, spoke a few words in Russian with Zworkin, then headed upstairs.

  Jo followed after them. As she climbed the stairs she realized that Markov was just behind her.

  “My hands are shaking,” she said to him.

  “Yes,” he replied. Nothing more.

  Stoner was out in the hallway, also in coveralls that the Russians had furnished. The technical team surrounded him like a phalanx of bodyguards, like an escort of white-robed priests.

  “I’m to go with him,” Markov muttered, pushing his way past Jo.

  “Kirill!” Stoner said with a happy grin. “Good morning. Will you kindly tell these guys that I’m ready to go? What’re we standing around here for? Let’s get the show on the road.”

  Markov spoke in Russian and the technicians laughed and nodded to one another. They started for the stairs. Jo started to move aside for them, then saw that Zworkin and all the others had clustered at the bottom of the steps, craning their necks upward.

  The farewell committee, she thought.

  Stoner stopped as he came next to her. “So long, kid. Thanks for everything.”

  She froze, unable to move her hands, pinned against the wall by the crowd of technicians.

  “Good luck, Keith,” she managed to whisper.

  He leaned over, kissed her lightly. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.

  Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs in his flight boots, Markov slightly ahead of him, the technicians following behind.

  Jo stood there, suddenly alone in the upstairs hallway, and thought:

  At least he’s on his way. They won’t try anything now. If they did, it would kill the cosmonaut who’s going up with him.

  It was nearly midnight in Washington, but the Oval Office was brightly lit and filled with the President’s advisers.

  “How long before lift-off?” asked the press secretary.

  “Less than two hours now,” the science adviser answered. She was sitting rigidly upright on one of the straight-backed chairs that had been brought in from the secretary’s office.

  “When do we start praying?” cracked Senator Jay. He was working on his third scotch of the evening.

  “I started an hour ago,” the President said from behind his desk.

  Their eyes were all riveted on the TV screen built into the wall of the Oval Office. It displayed the picture being relayed out of Tyuratam without the interruptions of the networks’ commercial coverage. The President could, at the touch of a button on his desk, switch on commentary from any network he chose, or from the NASA analysts who were monitoring the broadcast from the basement offices under the West Wing. At the moment, the CBS News commentary was being shown, printed on a smaller screen beneath the big picture. The President kept the sound off.

  Walden C. Vincennes, tanned and handsome in his flowing, leonine gray hair, somehow had managed to get the old Kennedy rocker for himself and place it to the right of the President’s desk.

  “If they pull this off, Mr. President,” he said, his rich baritone cutting through the other conversations buzzing around the room, “your stock will go up incredibly high.”

  “Perhaps,” said the President. “We’ll see.”

  The press secretary focused his attention on the two of them, even though he was sitting all the way across the room, wedged into the couch between Senator Jay and General Hofstader.

  Vincennes smiled like a movie star. “You know, Mr. President, if all this goes well, the people might demand that you reconsider your decision not to run again.”

  The President shook his head. “I doubt it.”

  “There could be a draft at the convention.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve heard…talk.”

  It seemed to take an effort for the President to pull his eyes from the TV screen. “Walden, if we make contact with this alien spaceship, and if it’s not hostile, and if there’s a lot to be gained from the contact—don’t you think I’ll have my hands full, between now and November? How could I campaign for re-election and do justice to all that?”

  Vincennes put on a thoughtful look. His smile faded by degrees, but the press secretary thought his eyes looked even happier than they had when he’d been smiling.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Vincennes said.

  “And if this doesn’t go well,” the President went on, “if that young man dies or the alien turns out to be hostile or some form of monster…then I’m finished anyway.”

  “That’s true. But I’m sure it will all go well.”

  The press secretary laughed to himself. Vincennes is angling for the Chief’s endorsement as the party’s candidate. I’ll be damned! He really wants to run for it! Then he thought, more seriously, I ought to have a long talk with him about it. He’ll need an experienced staff, after all.

  In California it was 9 P.M. and all the prime-time television shows had been pre-empted for the live coverage of the space shot.

  Doug and Elly Stoner sat in their grandparents’ living room, watching the TV set. Their mother was out with friends. Their grandparents flanked them on the long sectional sofa as Walter Cronkite explained:

  “This will be the most difficult and complex manned space mission ever attempted, demanding as it does that the astronaut-cosmonaut team fly four times deeper into space than any human being has ever gone before.”

  Cronkite was sitting at a curved command console of a desk. Behind him a four-color chart showed the position of the Earth, the Moon and the alien spacecraft.

  “Already, a team of Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soviet space station Salyut Six has assembled three modules rocketed up from Tyuratam over the past two weeks.”

  Pictures of the space modules appeared behind Cronkite’s ear, replacing the chart. The modules were silvery cylinders with bent-wing panels of solar energy cells jutting out from each side. Each module bore the red letters CCCP stenciled on its side.

  “These modules contain the air-recycling equipment, food and water for the two-week-long space mission,” Cronkite went on, “as well as the scientific apparatus
with which the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut will study the alien spacecraft, and—if everything goes very well—make a rendezvous in space with this visitor from a distant solar system.”

  Doug fidgeted nervously on the sofa, wishing for a beer. His sister shot him a stern glance, then returned her attention to the television screen.

  “Piloting the Soyuz spacecraft will be Major Nikolai Federenko, a veteran of three earlier Soviet space missions. The scientist-astronaut will be Dr. Keith Stoner, of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA. Dr. Stoner…”

  For some ridiculous reason, tears sprang up in Doug’s eyes. He kept his face rigidly staring forward, toward the blurring TV screen, and felt thankful that the living room was too dark for his grandparents or his sister to see him.

  Markov had no children and his only sibling—an older sister—had married and moved off to an industrial city in the Caucasus while Kirill was still in college. So the emotional swirl of walking Stoner through the long morning caught him unaware.

  As the American’s translator, Markov went every step of the way with Stoner as they entered the launch control building, sat down for the final physical checkup (a simple blood test and EKG) and then went downstairs to suit up.

  “It’s like a bridegroom putting on his tuxedo,” Stoner said as a pair of white-smocked technicians helped him climb into the bulky, cumbersome pressure suit.

  Markov sat on a bench and leaned his back against a metal locker. “More like a knight putting on his armor,” he observed.

  Next they went out to a minibus and drove to the launching pad. With four other technicians crowding into the rickety elevator cab, they rode to the top of the launch tower. Stoner looked to Markov as if some puffy white headless monster had almost completely swallowed him. Markov felt jittery, almost sick to his stomach, as if he had forgotten something vital, as if something terribly wrong was about to happen.

  But these are all good, hardworking men. They have devoted their lives to our space programs. They wouldn’t deliberately sabotage their own work. They couldn’t!

  Yet he felt far from reassured. It only takes one rotten apple, whispered a coiled cobra inside his brain.