Voyagers II - The Alien Within

by Ben Bova

“What is it?” he snapped.

  The voice from the communicator was a thin, weak piping. “An urgent message, sir. Private.”

  Nillson forced himself not to frown. To An Linh, he said softly, “Would you excuse me for a moment?”

  “Of course.”

  He got up from the table and went through the open portal to his desk. Taking up the phone handset, he growled, “This had better be important.”

  The face that appeared on the screen set into the desktop was Archie Madigan’s. His normal grin had vanished. He looked worried.

  “She took Stoner aboard the jumpjet.”

  Nillson lowered his voice. “They’re headed for Maine, then?”

  No reply for the span of a heartbeat, then, “That’s what she wants you to think. She switched planes at the refueling stop in Nebraska. Two people who look like her and Stoner will go to the house in Maine, but it won’t be them.”

  Nillson felt anger flaring hot inside him. “Where’s she going, then?”

  “We’re not certain….”

  “Then find out, damn you! Find out quickly!”

  “Yessir.”

  He slammed the phone back into its cradle. His breath snorted out of him in furious gasps. She’s taken him off to some secret hideaway, has she? The bitch! I knew she’d run off with him. After all I’ve done for her, she’s still got the hots for her childhood sweetheart. Well, she’ll regret it. They’ll both regret it. By the time I get finished with them they’ll both be happy to be dead.

  Then he looked up and saw An Linh staring at him from the dining room.

  CHAPTER 12

  Everett Nillson had lived with fear all his life. Fear, and anger.

  As he replaced the phone in its cradle, watching An Linh’s eyes following him, he struggled within himself to keep his fury from boiling out, to keep himself under control. From childhood he had fought this battle. Never let the anger show. He knows that the anger is born out of fear.

  “You must never be afraid,” he heard his father’s booming voice. “Fear is a sign of cowardice, and I will not have a coward for my son!”

  Nillson had been born to great wealth. Vanguard Industries had been his father’s creation, and from long before he had been old enough to understand, he had been told, by his mother, his governess, his tutors, and especially by his father himself, how Lars Nillson had fought his way up from the grimy coveralls of a factory grease monkey to the elegant dinner jacket of a successful industrialist.

  “And I did it all for you!” his father constantly reminded young Everett. He would pick up the child in his beefy hands and swing him dizzyingly around the huge, opulent drawing room of their home outside Stockholm. “All for you! Someday all this will be yours!”

  Everett was an asthmatic baby, a frail child who preferred hiding in his room and watching videos to playing with the bullies and sadists of his own age. His father raged at his weakness, blamed his silent and suffering mother, and swore that he would never leave the industrial empire he had created to a weakling.

  But there was no one else to leave it to, and in the end, when a microscopic blood vessel in Lars Nillson’s brain exploded and killed him, Everett Nillson became the chairman of the board of Vanguard Industries. He was barely twenty.

  And terrified. But for the first time in his life he held in his thin, bony hands something that almost compensated for his fear: power.

  The two were an awesome synergy. The more Nillson feared someone or something, the more he wielded his power against it. He sought power constantly, more power always, to keep the fear that ate at his innards under control. Vanguard Industries was slipping when Everett Nillson assumed control. An economic recession racked the industrial world, and his father’s generation of managers seemed unable to fend off the politicians who were intent on nationalizing the company. Everett Nillson bought politicians with money, drugs, women, flattery, and the most dazzling bribes of them all: visions of higher political office. He fired managers ruthlessly and put men his own age in their places. And women.

  For the first time in his young life, Nillson found women pursuing him. And he quickly learned that no matter what he wanted from them, no matter how dominating or cruel or outright sadistic he might be, there were always women willing to submit to him.

  He watched one woman with a special fascination: an American who burned with an unquenchable determination to reach into space and recover the alien spacecraft that had briefly passed by the ball of dirt and blood called Earth. He watched Jo Camerata climb up the corporate ladder of Vanguard Industries, watched her in her office and in the bedrooms of the men who could help her. He began to help her himself, and finally he married her. He knew that he could not dominate her in bed, or even in the office. She would never willingly submit to him. But he would break her spirit, sooner or later. One day she would drop to her knees before him. And that day was approaching quickly.

  But now she had flown off with her former lover, and Nillson felt again the burning fury that was born of fear. Jo was trying to escape him, trying to best him at his own game of power. She was smart enough, and tough enough, to win. That was what frightened Everett Nillson. That, and the gnawing pain that clawed at his innards.

  She had to be humbled. Only victory would silence the fear that tortured Nillson. Complete victory. A victory that had to end in death.

  An Linh could see that the phone call had enraged Nillson, but he fought to maintain his self-control as he returned to the dining room and finished his lunch with her.

  “A business problem?” she asked.

  He glared at her momentarily, then composed himself. “Yes. Strictly business.”

  She thought otherwise. They finished lunch with hardly another word. But as An Linh was leaving Nillson’s office, he asked her:

  “How familiar are you with the labs?”

  She blinked at him, surprised by the question.

  “Have you gone through them? Do you know what they’re like?”

  “Not in any great detail,” she admitted. “I’ve been working at the corporate level, not…”

  “Not down at the level where the real work is done,” he finished for her.

  Picking up his desktop phone, Nillson said, “I’ll get someone from the labs’ PR department to give you a tour of the place. If you’re going to film a documentary, you ought to know what’s going on there.”

  Nillson turned An Linh over to a secretary, who led her through the quiet, paneled corridors of the executive office area to a public relations woman who was to “show her around the labs.”

  After two hours of being toured around the Vanguard facilities, An Linh felt the numbing dizziness of sensory overload. Chemistry labs sparkling with glass apparatus, bubbling and chuffing, odd smells and wary glances from intense-looking men and women in white smocks. A microsurgery room that looked like the control center for a space mission, crammed with beeping electronics and row upon row of display screens. A full-fledged zoo populated by barking dogs, ponderous minihogs whose bare pink skin looked strangely repulsive, and sad-eyed, pensive chimpanzees and gorillas who looked out through the bars of their cages at An Linh as if they knew what was in store for them.

  The tingle of alarm that she had felt during her lunch with Nillson faded from her mind as she walked through corridor after corridor, laboratory after laboratory, through offices and workshops and what seemed to be a small but very modern and highly automated hospital section.

  Her guide finally detoured into a minicafeteria, saying to An Linh as she pushed through its swinging door, “I’ll bet you could use some caffeine.”

  “And a pair of roller skates,” she replied.

  An Linh sank gratefully into the closest chair at the first table in the little cafeteria and let her handbag clunk to the floor. It seemed to have gained half a ton since lunch. The cafeteria was actually nothing more than an extended alcove in the corridor, walled off by translucent plastic partitions and lined with automatic food
and drink dispensers. There were only six small round tables, with four plastic chairs at each. The walls were pale green, the floor tiles slightly darker.

  Almost like a sidewalk bistro in Avignon, An Linh thought, except that this is indoors and automated and serving preprocessed garbage instead of good coffee and real bread and cheese.

  “Coffee or tea?” her guide asked.

  “Tea, please. With milk.”

  The woman was about An Linh’s own age, pencil slim, with the kind of tightly curled auburn hair that could only be produced by the cosmetics industry. She wore a mannish suit of gray, the blouse unbuttoned down to where it disappeared behind her vest. Not that it mattered, An Linh thought; her chest was just as skinny as the rest of her. Her face was long and narrow, too. She wore eyeglasses as a decoration; no one her age needed them, not with monolayer lenses that you sprayed on and washed off.

  The nametag on her jacket read Rebecca Parker. As she sat down and placed two cheerfully decorated plastic mugs on the little table, she sympathized, “It’s a lot to take in the first time around.”

  An Linh sipped at the tea. It was tepid. “I appreciate your taking the time to show me everything.”

  Rebecca shrugged. “It’s my job.”

  “You do this all the time?”

  “A lot of the time. It’s the way I keep my girlish figure.”

  An Linh nodded and took another swallow of the lukewarm tea.

  “It must have been great being on television,” Rebecca said.

  “It’s like anything else. Mostly hard work.”

  “I suppose you have to have the looks for it.”

  “Sure.” Seeing the question in her eyes, An Linh added, “You could do it. You’d be fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Well…maybe you’d have to think about redoing your hairstyle. I think something longer and more natural would complement your facial structure better.”

  “Oh, do you think so?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you’ve got such great looks—you’re a real natural beauty.”

  An Linh broke into a grin. “Then why do I have to spend so much time fixing my face and hair?”

  They both laughed.

  An Linh took another sip of tea, then said, “There’s a professional service in Honolulu, you know. Send them a hologram of yourself and they’ll send you a complete analysis of hairstyles, makeup—everything.”

  “Must be expensive.”

  “The company should pay for it. After all, it’s important for anyone in PR to look their best.”

  Rebecca frowned sadly. “My boss would never okay it. He’s a real…well, he wouldn’t okay it, I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Then I will,” An Linh said. “You come over to my office tomorrow and I’ll approve the request. If your boss complains, tell him to call me.”

  Rebecca’s mouth dropped open. An Linh thought, I’m going to need a friend inside the laboratory complex. This girl could be helpful, especially if she thinks there’s a job opening at the corporate level waiting for her.

  Now they were friends, and they both leaned forward slightly, toward each other, their heads coming closer as they began to talk about clothes and apartments and, inevitably, men. Slowly, slowly, An Linh steered the conversation toward Rebecca’s job, the work she did for the labs, the responsibilities she had, the tours she led for visitors.

  “You got the ten-dollar tour,” Rebecca told her. “That’s just about the best one. Mr. Nillson himself wanted the red carpet rolled out for you.”

  “He’s a very”—An Linh deliberately put a hitch in her voice—“different kind of man, isn’t he?”

  “Nillson? I’ve never been privileged to meet him. He’s too high up on the totem pole for menials like me to actually be introduced to.”

  “He seemed kind of…” She let the thought dangle.

  “Strange?” Rebecca suggested. “A little on the weird side?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “There’ve been rumors. Stories. They say he’s a little kinky.”

  “Really?”

  “Maybe a lot kinky.” Rebecca giggled.

  An Linh looked down into her tea mug, then back at Rebecca. “Well, anyway, he ordered the ten-dollar tour for me.”

  Rebecca glanced at her watch. “Yeah. I guess I ought to give you the rest of it before quitting time.”

  “Will we see the cryonics facility?”

  She nodded as she pushed herself up from the table. “That’s next on our itinerary.”

  “And the frozen astronaut?”

  Behind her lensless glasses, Rebecca’s eyes widened for just the flash of a second. “No, not that. Off limits, even on the ten-dollar tour. You need a special written pass to see him, approved personally by Mrs. Nillson.”

  Picking up her handbag and getting to her feet, An Linh asked, “But he’s well, isn’t he? Nothing’s gone wrong with him?”

  Rebecca gave her a troubled look. “I’m not supposed to say anything about him. Really, I don’t know a thing. You must know a lot more about him than I do.”

  An Linh nodded. She’s afraid to talk about him. The word’s gone out that the frozen astronaut is to be kept secret. No news is good news, as far as his case is concerned.

  She dropped the subject and allowed Rebecca to lead her into the cryonics laboratory. To An Linh, the place looked and felt like a combination of a morgue and the butcher’s section at the supermarket. It was cold, the kind of cold that seeps into the bones. Stainless-steel cylinders that they called dewars, big vaults with heavy steel doors, bare tiled floors. The technicians here worked in heavy coveralls and rubberized gloves. All of the bodies An Linh saw were animals, from baby mice to a full-grown chimpanzee lying on a cold slab, faint traces of frost glistening on the hairs of its face.

  With a sudden shudder, An Linh thought of her mother lying inside one of those gleaming steel cylinders, frozen, trusting her daughter to watch over her and bring her back to life.

  “Have you seen enough?” She felt Rebecca’s hand on her trembling arm. The woman’s voice was sincerely concerned.

  “Yes,” An Linh said. “Thanks.”

  Rebecca led her in silence out of the cryonics lab. They walked slowly down a long corridor. One entire wall of it was windows, and An Linh felt the warmth of the life-giving sun soaking into her.

  “One more stop,” Rebecca said. “Legal department. They want to talk to you about something; I don’t know what.”

  “I’m going to bring a man here for freezing,” An Linh said. “We’re making a documentary of it.”

  “Supersonic!” Rebecca said. “What a great idea!”

  “He’s a priest,” An Linh added.

  “Oh, for…You’ll get an Emmy easy.”

  An Linh made herself smile. Easy. To Rebecca the priest was an object, a prop in a TV show, a character to be photographed. Then her smile faded. And what is Father Lemoyne to me? I know him, I even love him like the father who never loved me, and I’m the one who’s using him.

  “One warning,” Rebecca whispered as they turned into a corridor that was suddenly carpeted and decorated with potted plants and paintings on the walls.

  “Oh?”

  “I’m supposed to bring you in to see Archibald S. Madigan, the head of our legal department.”

  An Linh waited for the rest of it.

  “Be careful with him,” Rebecca advised. “He’s got a poet’s tongue and a policeman’s hands.”

  Grinning, An Linh said, “I know Archie. He’s got a lot more than that.”

  It was late in the evening before An Linh finally got back to her apartment in Hilo. Baker was waiting for her.

  She was only slightly surprised when she opened her apartment door and saw him sitting tensely on the sofa. A pair of candles flickered on the coffee table. She saw a bottle of wine and a dish of cheeses and a real baguette already sliced and waiting.

  The Australian hopped to his fe
et and greeted her with a kiss.

  “I thought you’d like some real food after a hard day at the office.”

  She patted his cheek. “You’re a mind reader.”

  An hour later, the wine was gone, the cheeses reduced to a few morsels, and nothing was left of the bread but a scattering of crumbs across the coffee table, sofa, and carpet.

  And for some reason, Cliff Baker was as tense as a hunted animal. An Linh could not find out why. She had asked him a half-dozen times why he was so wound up, but he had merely brushed her questions away and asked for more details about her lunch with Nillson.

  “He’ll let us bring Father Lemoyne in for freezing,” she said.

  “And tape it?”

  “Yes.” She did not tell him about Nillson’s demand for her to be a surrogate mother and his clumsy, almost halfhearted flirtation.

  “That’s good. That’s really good.”

  She had never seen his sky-blue eyes look so troubled. If he had been skeptical, even mocking, An Linh could have accepted it. Cliff always played the cynic. But he was strangely tense, almost as if he were terribly afraid of something that he refused to talk about.

  “Cliff, you’re going to have to be very careful,” An Linh insisted. “They’re keeping the astronaut under very tight security. They don’t want any premature publicity. No leaks….”

  “I understand that!” he snapped. “You don’t have to repeat it twenty times!”

  “But I think they’re moving him to another location. That’s what Nillson’s phone conversation was all about.”

  “And you don’t know where?”

  Is that what’s bothering him? That they’re moving the astronaut, and now it doesn’t matter whether they let Father Lemoyne into the labs or not?

  “I don’t think even Nillson knows where. He seemed terribly angry.”

  “But that phone call,” Baker said. “You think it had something to do with his wife?”

  “Yes, his wife,” she replied slowly, uneasily. “Every time I mentioned her he sort of bristled. And he was really furious over the phone call. I don’t think he’d get that angry over just a business matter; he’s not the type. It had something to do with his wife, I’m sure of it.”