Voyagers II - The Alien Within

by Ben Bova

  He pulled a slim black rectangle from his pocket, then shook an even thinner disc from inside it. The disc coruscated in the light from the window, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow. Wordlessly, Madigan went to the TV set built into the walnut wall paneling and slid the disc into its video recorder slit.

  Baker stepped around the low coffee table to stand beside An Linh. She wanted him to put his arm around her shoulders and make her feel protected. But he had moved toward her merely to get a better view of the TV screen.

  Stepping back, Madigan told them, “The picture quality won’t be too good, and there’s no sound. This was taken through a very long-range lens.”

  The screen showed a pair of people sitting on a blanket on a beach, a picnic basket opened beside them. An Linh thought the scene looked like Hawaii.

  The camera zoomed in. The picture was blocked momentarily by a truck passing by. Heat waves made the image dance and flicker. But as the focus tightened, An Linh recognized the woman.

  “That’s Mrs. Nillson, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Madigan nodded.

  “And who’s that with her?” asked Baker.

  An Linh already knew. She had studied that face, too, for many years and seen it briefly on another videotape.

  “Dr. Keith Stoner,” she said, her voice weak from the sudden breathlessness that assailed her.

  “Stoner! The astronaut!”

  “He’s really alive,” An Linh said. Somehow, seeing him outside the laboratory setting made his revival seem more genuine to her. And she knew that if Stoner lived, her mother could also.

  “He is indeed,” Madigan said. The grin on his face seemed faintly mocking.

  They watched in silence as the man and woman sat on the beach, talking. An Linh wished she could read lips. Abruptly, the camera zoomed back. An airplane swooped in from over the water, hovered above the beach, then settled gently onto the sand. Stoner and Mrs. Nillson jumped to their feet and ran to the plane.

  The screen went dark.

  “That’s it,” Madigan said. “They took off for parts unknown.”

  “Unknown?” An Linh echoed.

  Baker frowned at the lawyer. “D’you expect us to believe that Vanguard Industries doesn’t know where its own president is? Or where Stoner is?”

  “Not only that,” Madigan replied easily, “but I expect you to help us find him.”

  “Now wait—”

  But Madigan was already saying, “We know they flew off to the mainland. At a refueling stop there they switched planes—after putting a pair of actors who physically resembled them into their own plane. The actors are at Mrs. Nillson’s summer home in Maine right now, going through the motions of pretending they are her and Stoner.”

  “But where did the real ones go?”

  Madigan retrieved his video disc from the TV and slipped it back into his pocket. He pointed an index finger at the bar in the corner of the sitting room.

  “Do you mind? After all, this suite is coming off my expense account.”

  Baker shrugged, then said, “I’ll join you. Anything for you, love?”

  She shook her head, remembering how the wine of the previous night had affected her. She still felt rather weak, whether from the aftereffects of whatever it was that had knocked her out or the excitement of the past twenty-four hours. She went to the couch along the far wall and sat in it.

  Sliding behind the bar with the ease of long practice, Madigan found a bottle of Scotch and poured himself a generous dollop into a cut-glass tumbler.

  “Ahh,” he sighed after a long swallow. “God bless those kilted sonsofbitches.”

  An Linh insisted, “Where are Mrs. Nillson and Dr. Stoner now?”

  “We really don’t know,” Madigan said lightly. To Baker, “Scotch for you?”

  “Is there any beer back there?”

  Madigan ducked down for a moment and came up with a bottle. To An Linh he said, “Their plane crossed the Atlantic, refueled in Madrid, and went on to Italy. We bribed enough air traffic controllers to find out that they landed at Rome. We lost track of them there.”

  “Lost track of them?”

  “It’s a huge airport. Of course, if we had known ahead of time that they were going to Rome, we would have had people there to observe them. But as it is…” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “So what do you expect us to do about it?” Baker asked, the beer bottle tight in one fist.

  “Help us to find them.”

  “Us? You mean Vanguard Industries needs help?”

  Madigan’s face turned slightly sorrowful. “All right, the one who needs the help is me. Yours truly.”

  “I don’t understand,” said An Linh from the couch.

  “It’s not too complicated,” Madigan answered. “Jo—Mrs. Nillson—has run off with Stoner. Why, I can’t say. Her husband thinks she’s been in love with the man since they worked together eighteen years ago.”

  Baker gave a low whistle. “There’s a bloody human-interest angle for you!”

  “Don’t count on it,” Madigan snapped almost angrily. “I know Jo. She doesn’t act on impulse, and she never lets her emotions overrule her intellect. She’s hidden Stoner away for some reason of her own.”

  “And not told her husband about it?” An Linh marveled. “The chairman of the board?”

  “Corporate politics can get rather Byzantine,” Madigan said.

  “But how the hell do you expect us to do anything about it?”

  Madigan’s smile returned. This time it looked impish, An Linh thought.

  “Jo knows Vanguard inside out. She knows how her husband thinks, she knows how I think. She’s prepared for whatever we might do, I’m sure.”

  “But she doesn’t know me.”

  “You’ve got it! Within a day or so, my operatives around the continent will pin down her location. But once they do, I’m going to need somebody she doesn’t know—somebody she won’t be on guard against—to make contact with her and find out just what in the seven tiers of purgatory she’s up to.”

  An Linh saw that Cliff was intrigued by the idea, and Madigan was playing him like a master programmer works a computer.

  “Why should we help you?” she demanded. “What do we get out of it?”

  Madigan took another long pull of Scotch. Then, leaning his forearms on the bar, he smiled his most wickedly at her.

  “First, there is the matter of Mr. Nillson. He’s certain that you’re prying into his private business, and he does not take kindly to spies. I can protect you from him.”

  “Protect…?”

  Raising a hand to stifle her question, Madigan said, “You have both been fired from your jobs, you know. He ordered me to do it, and I did.”

  An Linh looked at Baker. He did not seem surprised or particularly upset.

  “I can see to it that you get your job back, Cliff, or even a better job elsewhere. And you’ll be able to do the documentary you want to do, about the priest.” Turning to An Linh, “You’re a tougher problem, I’m afraid. He’s really furious with you.”

  “But why?…”

  “He saw through your little scheme about the priest, that’s why! He’s not stupid. He knows you were just kidding him along. Apparently, he’s hot for your body, as well. A bad combination—for you.”

  “What can we do to protect An Linh?” Baker asked.

  “Damned if I know, except to keep her hidden from him. Right now, he wants her strung up by her thumbs.”

  An Linh felt a surge of fright race through her.

  Madigan’s smile turned darkly threatening. “Not literally, An Linh. Not quite. But he’s a man who likes to combine punishment with pleasure.”

  Baker started, “There’s no way—”

  “No way you can protect her,” Madigan interrupted, “once he sets his mind on having her.”

  An Linh felt the panic within her subsiding. She thought she understood what the lawyer was saying.

 
; “You’re offering to protect me if we help you to locate Mrs. Nillson and Dr. Stoner.”

  As graciously as a cavalier of old, Madigan bowed and replied, “I am promising to protect you.”

  “If we help you.”

  “Oh, I know you’ll help me. You really have no choice, have you?”

  CHAPTER 14

  For two days Stoner prowled through the hilltop villa and its lovely grounds, growing more uneasy with each passing hour. Richards did not show up. But someone was out there, beyond the fence that marked the edge of Jo’s property. More than one person. Watching. Waiting. Stoner saw no one: heard nothing. But he knew they were out there. He felt it in the tightness of his stomach, in the prickling sensation along the back of his neck. A premonition of danger.

  Jo left and stayed away overnight. When she returned she seemed grim, almost haggard, preoccupied.

  That evening they dined together on the patio, served only by robots, unfeeling machines whose loyalty was built into them.

  “That was a magnificent dinner,” Stoner said, pushing his nearly polished dish slightly away from him.

  “I’ll tell the cook you enjoyed it.”

  “What was the pasta?”

  “Fettuccine Alfredo. And the veal was a local specialty, vitello Napolitano.”

  He drained the last of the dry red wine and put the wineglass down carefully on the tablecloth, precisely flat on its base, like an astronaut landing a spacecraft on the surface of an alien planet.

  The moon had not yet risen. The only light on the patio came from the candles on their table and the soft glow from the distant lights of Naples. Even this late at night, it was warm and lovely. Fireflies winked in the shadows of the shrubbery. The air bore the tang of the sea and the lingering scent of daylight’s flowers. Jo wore a floor-length hostess gown of Egyptian motif, royal blue edged with hieroglyphic symbols in gold, her arms bare. Stoner had found fresh clothes waiting in his room. On a hunch, he had dressed up for dinner: white turtleneck shirt, navy-blue slacks, maroon double-breasted blazer.

  “How did things go in Hawaii?” he asked.

  Jo blinked and focused her eyes on him, as if seeing him for the first time since dinner had started. “I didn’t go to Hawaii.”

  “Oh? Then where…”

  “New York. Connecticut, actually. The corporate offices are in Greenwich.”

  “Is that where your PR director is?”

  A small smile crept across Jo’s face. “No, she’s gone.”

  “She’s quit?”

  “She was fired by my…by the chairman of the board. I don’t know exactly why, but it saves me the trouble of getting rid of her.”

  Stoner grinned back at her. “You’re a tough broad, aren’t you?”

  “I have to be.”

  “And what did Healy say about me?”

  She looked startled. “How did you know…”

  “It’s obvious that you’d talk to Healy and the other scientists who’ve been involved in my case. What about Richards? Is he coming here or not?”

  “He’s asked to be taken off your case.”

  Stoner blinked with surprise. “He…what?”

  Jo’s smile changed into an expression of reluctantly amused respect. “Dr. Richards told me that he realizes you’ve been manipulating him—something about riding in his car to the beach.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “He doesn’t think he can deal with you. He’s frightened of you, Keith.”

  For a moment Stoner felt slightly like a teenaged boy who’d been caught peeking into girlie magazines. But then he realized the irony of it: Richards, the psychiatrist, was afraid of dealing with an equal, afraid of confronting his own psyche, afraid of revealing himself to another human being. A wave of sadness washed over Stoner.

  “I could have helped him,” he murmured.

  “You could have helped him?”

  Stoner nodded.

  She frowned slightly. Touching the button on her bracelet that summoned the robot, Jo said, “I’m going to have to find another psychiatrist to deal with you. And that means a security risk.”

  “I’m sorry to be so much trouble.”

  The robot glided across the marble patio and began taking the dishes off the table with its clawlike metal hands. Stoner saw that they were gentle, almost delicate, despite their mechanical nature. And there was a video lens built into the “palm” of each hand, between the gripping claws.

  “Will the new man be coming here?” Stoner knew Jo would pick a male psychiatrist.

  “Not here. I’ll set up a video phone link, so the two of you can talk face to face. But he won’t know where you are, and I don’t want you to tell him.”

  Stoner thought it over for a few moments. He turned slightly in his chair and looked out at the city, a sea of twinkling lights arching along the crescent of the bay, outshining the stars in the dark night sky. A soft breeze wafted in from the sea, carrying the piercingly sweet song of a distant bird.

  “Is that a nightingale?” he asked.

  Jo cocked her head slightly, listening. “I think so. There’re plenty of them around here.”

  “I’ve never heard a nightingale before,” Stoner said, feeling as pleased as a child who’s found that storybook tales can come true.

  He listened for several minutes to the breathtakingly beautiful warbling.

  Finally Jo broke in, “Respighi wrote a nightingale passage into one of his tone poems.”

  Stoner felt his face knit into a disapproving frown at the interruption.

  She took it as puzzlement. “Not a live bird. A recording. One of the musicians plays the recording in the middle of the orchestra.”

  He looked into her beautiful face, so serious, so preoccupied with other matters. In the flickering light cast by the candles, Jo’s dark eyes gleamed.

  Stoner reached out his hand toward her, and she took it in hers. He got to his feet, she rose also, and he led her to the balustrade, where the grim-faced statues kept their backs resolutely to the teeming city below.

  “Jo,” he said softly, “you’ve got everything that a human being needs for happiness. Why are you pushing yourself? What are you trying to accomplish?”

  For an instant, she almost smiled. “You expect me to say that I’ve got everything except love, don’t you?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not expecting anything, Jo. I just want to know why you’re driving so hard. Why you’re so unhappy.”

  “Do you love me, Keith?”

  “I did, eighteen years ago. I was too tied up inside my own soul to know it, but I did love you, then.”

  “And now?”

  He gazed deep into her eyes and saw there what he had seen in Richards and in every human being he had looked into: Fear. And pain.

  “We’re both different people now, Jo,” he said gently.

  “I see.”

  “No, I don’t think you do.”

  “Don’t I? What we had eighteen years ago, whatever it was—that’s dead. You froze it when you went off into space, and nothing we can do will bring it back to life.”

  “You’re probably right….”

  “Probably?”

  “But we’re alive, Jo,” he said. “Something new can be born between us.”

  “You think so?” The smile on her lips was scornful, distrusting.

  Taking both her hands in his, Stoner told her, “I don’t blame you for trying to protect yourself. I know I’ve hurt you, even though I never meant to.”

  Jo’s bitter smile faded. The hardness in her expression thawed. Now there was a question in her eyes.

  “Give it time, Jo. Don’t you understand what this business of immortality really means? We have all the time we need. All the time in the world!”

  “Time…for what?”

  “To learn. To grow. To understand.”

  She leaned her cheek against his chest. He slid his arms around her.

  “Keith, I don’t want to be alone.”

&n
bsp; “I know,” he said. “Nobody does. We’re warmblooded creatures, Jo. We need each other. We can’t survive by ourselves.”

  And while he said it, he suddenly seemed to be looking down at the scene, watching a man and a woman embracing on the marble-floored patio of a hilltop villa while the fireflies danced around them, and down below an ancient city reeking of human passions and blood. Stoner felt himself trembling as he clasped Jo to him. He held her tightly, as if afraid to let go, afraid that he would tumble out of her grasp and fall upward, into the dark night sky, as if Earth’s gravity no longer could claim him, and he would plummet farther and farther into the star-filled sky, never to return, lost to the world of his birth forever.

  But I am lost to the world of my birth, he told himself. I left that world willingly, knowing I could never return. I commanded my heirs to set my sarcophagus adrift on the sea of stars.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to blot out the vision of the long, stately, somber procession bearing his coffin to the tower that stretched beyond the clouds.

  “Listen,” Jo whispered.

  “Another nightingale?”

  “No.”

  He heard it. A man’s tenor voice, far in the distance, singing into the night air.

  “A Neapolitan love song,” Jo said. “He’s singing to his girlfriend.”

  Stoner grimaced in the darkness. “Like the fireflies,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  “He’s trying to attract a mate. Like the fireflies with their lights. Or the nightingale’s singing. Like bullfrogs croaking or peacocks displaying their finery. Males attempting to attract females.”

  “That’s about as romantic as a computer program,” Jo said.

  Shrugging, Stoner replied, “Romance is a human invention, the overlay of intelligence to the mating urge.”

  “Oh, really?” She clutched at his hair, her mouth seeking his, her body pressing against him. He held her while that distant part of his mind watched two alien animals entwined in their mating embrace. He felt a wrenching, tearing agony flame through him, as if he were being torn in two, every nerve ripping apart, severing, splitting like a cell fissioning under a microscope. He clutched Jo even tighter, holding on to her as a drowning man hangs on to a floating scrap of wood. Even so he felt himself being pulled away from her, his mind fleeing from the animal closeness, revolted by the heat of her body, the scent of her hair, the touch of her flesh. He wanted her, yet he was repulsed by the very idea.