Voyagers II - The Alien Within

by Ben Bova

  “His wife worked with the astronaut before he was frozen.”

  “I know.”

  Baker ran a finger absently along his broken nose. Then, “Lemme make a phone call.”

  “To who?”

  “Whom.” Baker got up from the sofa and went to the delicate escritoire in the corner of the living room. It was the one piece of furniture that An Linh had brought with her from Avignon: her mother’s writing desk. Now it served as a base for the phone terminal.

  As Baker tapped out the phone number he wanted and lifted the receiver to his ear, An Linh stretched out wearily on the sofa and gazed through half-closed eyes at the view through her terrace window. The moon sat poised above the rim of the Mauna Loa’s dark volcanic bulk. A cloud glided across its softly glowing face. An Linh closed her eyes. The excitement of the day had worn off. Fatigue and the wine were catching up with her.

  She woke, startled. Baker was tugging at her sleeve.

  “Come on, love, we’ve got to go,” he said. His face was set in a strangely determined scowl. He looked grim, frightened.

  “You can sleep here….”

  “No, you don’t understand. We’re leaving for London.”

  “London? When…why?…”

  “Tonight. There’s a flight leaving at eleven. We can just catch it if we hurry.”

  An Linh swung her feet to the carpet and stood up. “Tonight? You’re going to London now?” She felt stunned, bewildered.

  “Wake up!” he snapped almost angrily. “We’re both going to London. Right now. Not a moment to lose.”

  “Cliff, you can’t just—”

  “Start packing, dammit! I’m not kidding!”

  She felt her head swirling.

  Baker grasped her by the shoulders as if he wanted to shake her into obedience.

  “Listen to me,” he said urgently. “I just did some checking with a friend of mine who’s got a pipeline into Vanguard Industries. He said you overheard a very sensitive phone conversation he had with Nillson, and now Nillson’s afraid that you might have heard too much.”

  “But what…”

  “There’s no telling what a man with Nillson’s power might do,” Baker said. “My source was warning me to get you to someplace safe until Nillson calms down.”

  An Linh felt stunned. She heard herself arguing, “We can’t just run away because of a phone call! I’ve got my job, you’ve got yours….”

  “We’re going,” Baker said firmly. “I know some people in London who’ll take us in for a while.”

  He pushed her toward the bedroom and helped her pull a garment bag from her closet. An Linh began stuffing it with clothes, her thoughts spinning madly.

  “Aren’t you going to pack?” she asked as she rummaged through a bureau drawer.

  “Already have. My bag’s in the car, downstairs.”

  “Cliff, are you sure we’ve got to do this?”

  The fear in his eyes was real, but there was something more than fear there. An Linh could not determine what it was.

  “I’m sure, pet,” he muttered earnestly. “There’s no other way.”

  “But…”

  “You’ve got to trust me, An Linh. Please. It’s for your own good.”

  Filled with foreboding, she finished packing and zipped up the garment bag. Baker took it from her and hurried her toward the door.

  “Shouldn’t you call the airport?” An Linh asked.

  “We’re already booked for the flight,” he said, opening the front door for her.

  He did not mention that their reservations had been made by Archie Madigan’s secretary, or that Vanguard Industries was paying for their flight.

  EUROPE

  And mine has been the fate of those

  To whom the goodly earth and air

  Are banned, and barred—forbidden fare

  CHAPTER 13

  Keith Stoner stood at the stone balustrade and looked down at the city of Naples spread out before him, half-lost in morning mist. Statues of stern old Romans and scheming Renaissance opportunists scowled at him disapprovingly along the length of the railing. Far off to his left, Vesuvius smoldered sullenly, a thin, whitish cloud rising from its dark peak. The Mediterranean was gray and sulking beneath low clouds.

  “The land of your ancestors,” he said to Jo.

  She was sitting at the white wrought-iron table next to the fountain. It splashed softly while she poured morning coffee, strong and black and steaming, into two delicate demitasses. She was dressed in dark blue shorts and a sleeveless white top cut off at the midriff. Stoner still wore the same slacks and short-sleeve shirt he had arrived in the night before.

  “The home of my family,” said Jo. “How do you like it?”

  Stoner turned to survey the fountain and its sculptured cherubs, the gnarled old olive trees lining the pool, the flowering shrubs dotting the patio, the handsome stone villa. It spread across the hilltop, straight and clean-lined, walls glistening white, slanted roofs covered with red tile.

  “I don’t see why your family would ever leave a place like this to come to America,” he said.

  She laughed. “It wasn’t in my family then. My people came from down there”—she pointed vaguely toward the city—“in the slums. I bought this place for a couple of distant cousins of mine. They keep it for me. It’s a good retreat, a place to get away from it all.”

  “And nobody back in Hawaii knows that it’s yours.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Not even your husband.”

  The smile stayed on her face, but her voice became brittle. “No, not even Everett.”

  “Like a Mafia hideaway,” Stoner muttered.

  Jo’s smile brightened. “That’s right. I’m with my family here. They protect me and stay quiet about it.”

  “And how long do you expect to keep me here?”

  She patted the cushioned chair beside her. “Come and have some breakfast.”

  He sat while she touched a button on her wristwatch. The patio doors swung open and a squat little robot trundled out across the marble terrace. It stopped a precise thirty centimeters from the table’s edge and its top slid open to form a serving surface, while a tray of croissants, pastries, butter, and jams rose silently from its innards. Below the tray were dishes and tableware.

  Stoner watched Jo transfer the breakfast things to their table. He sipped at the coffee; it was as powerful as it smelled and even hotter than it looked. Darkly rich without being bitter. He recalled someone telling him once that coffee should be black as night, hot as hell, and strong as the love of a good woman. Closing his eyes, he tried to remember who it had been. That Naval Intelligence agent, Dooley. The man who had kept him under house arrest in the name of national security, back when he had first detected the alien spacecraft approaching Earth.

  “How long will I be here, Jo?”

  She looked at him, her eyes probing his. “I can’t say, Keith. A few weeks, at least.”

  “Is Richards coming here?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why all the secrecy? What’s going on?”

  A hint of fear flashed in her eyes, but it was immediately replaced by stubborn determination. “A lot’s going on, Keith. Corporate politics. I’ve got to get rid of the corporation’s public relations director, for one thing. And we’ve got to figure out why you’re not sleeping.”

  He pushed aside the dish of pastries as he leaned forward urgently. “Jo, has it occurred to you that my revival might have something to do with the fact that I’ve been”—he groped for a word—“influenced by the alien?”

  “Influenced?”

  “I was aboard that spacecraft for more than six years, wasn’t I?”

  “But he was dead. How could—”

  “The spacecraft was still functioning. The computer aboard it was still working. I’ll bet it was damned far ahead of anything we’ve built here on Earth.”

  She nodded. “It’s still so far ahead of us that no one’s been able ye
t to figure out how it works.”

  Eagerly, feeling the excitement bubbling up inside him, Stoner said, “Suppose the alien’s body is dead, but his mind, his personality, is inside that computer?”

  Jo stared at him, her eyes widening.

  “Suppose he was in contact with my mind—all those years, talking to me, merging with me…”

  “That’s…No, that can’t be….”

  “Can’t it? I get flashbacks, Jo. I see things that aren’t from my own life. Not from Earth. What Richards calls hallucinations are scenes from another world, another life. His life, Jo. The alien’s.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “It would ruin your business plans, wouldn’t it? I mean, maybe the only reason I survived freezing was because the alien helped me in some way you aren’t even aware of.”

  “No!”

  “But it might be true!” he insisted. “I’m the first person to be brought back. Richards told me so. You haven’t…”

  Then he saw the look of agony on her face and realized that not everything the psychiatrist had told him had been true.

  “Oh, my God, you did try it on other human beings.”

  Jo did not answer. She didn’t have to. Stoner saw it on her face.

  “And none of them came through.”

  She reached for the demitasse and took its whole contents in one long, swift gulp.

  “They were all volunteers,” Jo said at last. “From overseas. Asians, mostly. Two Filipinos, several Chinese, a dozen or so Indians and Pakistanis.”

  “And all of them poor,” Stoner added. “So poor that whatever you offered them for risking their lives was enough to get them to volunteer.”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “And none of them made it.”

  “It was pretty gruesome,” she admitted. “Horrible, really.”

  “Then why did you decide to try to bring me back? I mean, if none of them made it…”

  “I had no choice, Keith,” she said, almost pleading for his understanding. “The board insisted. They refused to keep funding the project. It was Everett’s doing, really. He demanded results or termination.”

  “Your husband.”

  “And the rest of the board went along with him. Healy—my chief scientist—he felt we had a chance. You had been in good physical condition when you were frozen. And he had revived two of the volunteers, briefly. One of them had lasted several days, but her brain was damaged too badly….”

  Stoner said nothing. The soft Mediterranean breeze touched his cheek, played with Jo’s dark hair. The fountain splashed happily.

  “Even when we restarted your heart and your body functions, you stayed in a coma for almost a week. I thought you might never come back to consciousness.”

  He turned in his chair and looked out toward the city sprawling below this hilltop villa. Millions of human beings were busily at work there, building and destroying, coupling and killing, brimming with joy and hate and tenderness and pain. And each of them, every individual one of them, fearing death. Hoping for immortality.

  He said slowly to Jo, “It might be that the only reason I was able to be revived is that the alien somehow brought me through. It might be that my success has nothing to do with the rest of the human race.”

  Jo stared at him as though seeing him for the first time in her life.

  An Linh stood in a crumpled daze in the busy lobby of the Savoy while Cliff Baker waited beside her for the registration clerk to check his credit number on the hotel’s computer.

  The flight from Hilo had taken little more than half an hour, once the rocket plane had started rolling down the long airport runway. It angled up into the sky and boosted into a high ballistic arc over the Pacific, then the rugged Kolyma range on the eastern tip of Siberia, across the frozen Arctic, and down the Norwegian and North seas to the British Isles.

  An Linh had dozed fitfully during the brief flight, stirring when the jarring vibration of returning to subsonic flight rattled the rocket plane and awakening fully when the landing gear went down with a loud roar and a thump.

  Now she stood befuddled, tired, aching in every joint of her body, longing for nothing more than a good night’s sleep—even though bright daylight poured through the revolving doors of the hotel lobby.

  No ordinary bellman showed them to their room. A tall, soft-speaking assistant manager in morning coat and elegant bowtie picked up their two scruffy travelbags and escorted them to the elevator, speaking quietly, proudly, of the Savoy’s illustrious history.

  “Bloody pom,” Baker whispered in An Linh’s ear as the assistant manager led them down a quiet corridor. “They teach ’em that phony queer accent, y’know.”

  An Linh was too tired to care about the Australian view of Englishmen. Through her haze of weariness, she thought she heard their man say that the hotel had been built by Messrs. Gilbert, Sullivan, and d’Oyly Carte. That sounded odd to her, but she felt too muddled to press the matter.

  The assistant manager ushered them into an elegant suite. The sitting room was a spacious expanse done in art deco, with walnut paneling and big couches covered with boldly striped fabrics. The bedroom was smaller, decorated in blue and white, with bureaus and a vanity that looked like a poor imitation of French Provincial style. But the bed was large and looked irresistibly inviting to An Linh.

  “Look!” Baker called to her from the sitting room. “You can see Big Ben!”

  “And in this direction,” the Englishman said ever so politely, “one can view Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

  Neither impressed An Linh so much as the wide, high, blue-covered bed. She ignored both the men and dropped herself onto it. Closing her eyes, she was asleep almost immediately. Her last thought was a nagging worry about why she should be so utterly exhausted.

  The thought was still in her mind when she awoke.

  She sat up on the bed, fully alert the instant her eyes opened. Her head was clear. She felt rested and fine. Daylight still brightened the windows. And she could hear voices coming from the adjoining room.

  An Linh took a deep, testing breath. Yes, she felt fine. What had hit her? she wondered. It had been a tense day, meeting Nillson and having lunch with him, touring the labs and taking the first steps to set up Cliff’s documentary. But no more hectic than plenty of other days she had put in. Half a bottle of wine and some cheese and bread with Cliff—and his sudden wild urgency about getting away from Hawaii.

  Why had she spun into such a downer? It was almost as if the wine had been drugged.

  The entire wall next to the bed was a set of mirrored doors; clothes closets behind them, she guessed. Her reflection showed dark lines under her eyes, hair tangled and matted, jumpsuit hopelessly wrinkled. She felt unwashed and sticky. For a few moments more she sat on the bed, listening to the voices from the next room. She easily recognized Cliff’s and knew that the other was not an Englishman speaking. The voice sounded almost American, but not quite. Male. Tantalizingly familiar.

  Glancing at her wristwatch, An Linh saw that it was still on Hawaii time. She tapped the reset button and whispered, “London,” into the watch’s miniaturized microphone. The glowing red numerals on the readout shifted by ten hours.

  She estimated that she had slept for several hours. Whatever it was that had so disoriented her had worked its way out of her system, and she was grateful for that. It frightened her to have her body fail her.

  An Linh got up carefully from her bed, left her shoes on the carpet exactly where she had dropped them, and tiptoed to the door that connected with the sitting room. She cracked the door open half an inch.

  Baker was sitting on the couch nearest the wide, sweeping windows that overlooked the Thames, the stately tower of Big Ben behind him in the distance.

  “I don’t like any of this,” he was saying, his voice low and intense, his face grimly serious. “And I especially don’t like dragging her into it.”

  His visitor sat in a wing chair, his back to An
Linh. She could not see his face, but she was certain she knew the voice and had heard it only recently.

  “She’s in it, my boy, whether either one of us likes it or not. And you’re the one who brought her in.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “I’m trying to protect her—to protect you both. Nillson’s no fool, you know. He sees what you’re after.”

  Baker shook his head. The grinning mask of cynicism that he usually presented to the world had disappeared. He looked truly concerned, almost angry.

  An Linh hesitated. She realized that she had been in this slitted jumpsuit for nearly twenty-four hours. She needed a shower, fresh clothes, and some attention to her makeup.

  “We’re trying to save a man’s life,” Cliff said. “A priest.”

  His visitor chuckled. “You’re after the frozen astronaut, and we all know it.”

  “You mean the thawed astronaut, don’t you?”

  No reply.

  An Linh smoothed her suit and ran both hands through her tangled hair, then pushed the door fully open.

  “He’s been revived; there’s no use pretending he hasn’t,” she said, stepping into the room.

  Baker’s grim face eased slightly into a worried smile as he got to his feet. Walking around the wing chair, An Linh saw that the other man was Archibald Madigan, Vanguard Industries’ chief counsel.

  Madigan smiled, too, and stood up. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “What’s going on?” An Linh demanded. “Why are you here?” Turning to Baker, “Why are we here?”

  Cliff looked to Madigan. The lawyer grinned broadly at An Linh, and she realized that his light hazel eyes could look greenish, or gray, or even almost blue, depending on the circumstances. Changeable eyes. Traitor’s eyes. This was a man who could not be trusted, An Linh knew.

  “Let me show you something,” Madigan said, fishing in the pocket of his shirt jacket. Like both of them, the lawyer was still wearing clothes more appropriate to Hawaii than London. He must have rushed over here just as fast as we did, An Linh thought.