by Ben Bova
And then every sense of his being suddenly focused on a brief glimmer of light down below the balustrade, in the tangled, half-wild garden that sloped down the hillside beyond the villa’s fences.
He jerked away from Jo, part of him enormously grateful for the excuse.
“What is it?” she asked, her body tensing.
“Someone’s down there,” he whispered, still holding her, but not so close.
“Where? What do you mean?”
“I saw something down in the shrubbery there.”
He felt her relax. “Probably Paolo or one of the other men. They patrol around the place every night.”
Stoner shook his head. “It’s not one man. There are three of them.”
“How can you—”
“And they’re armed. I think we’d better get inside.”
She peered into the dark garden. “Keith, you can’t possibly—”
“Yes, I can,” he said. Taking her by the hand, he started for the patio doors. “Come on, we’ll be safer inside.”
Jo let him lead her inside, then called her majordomo, as dark and slim and evil-looking as a twisted, deadly Neapolitan cigar. She told him to have the hillside searched thoroughly. He looked more annoyed than alarmed but bowed stiffly and left as silently as a shadow.
“This is crazy,” Jo said as they stood alone in the villa’s central hallway.
“Is it?”
She grinned ruefully. “Maybe not. There are plenty of people who’d like to know where you are.”
“Corporate competitors?” Stoner asked. “Or people within your own company?”
“Some of both.”
“And others?”
She started to answer, then thought better of it. Finally she said, “You can see why security is important.”
He looked around at the stone walls of the hallway. They had been built centuries ago to withstand sudden attack or long siege.
“I think it would be best if I went away for a while,” Stoner said.
“No,” Jo replied firmly. “You’ve got to stay here. For your own safety.”
“If there are others trying to get at me,” he reasoned, “then you’re in danger as long as I’m near you. Isn’t that true?”
“But I’m protecting you, Keith. You’re safe as long as you’re under my protection.”
“You don’t mind being in danger because of me?”
She shook her head silently. Looking deeply into her dark eyes, Stoner saw that she was telling him the truth—as she saw it.
Without thinking further about it, he lifted Jo off her feet and carried her to the sweeping staircase at the end of the hallway. She nestled her cheek against his shoulder, her arms locked around his neck. He knew without asking where her bedroom was. Up the broad, winding staircase, along the corridor to the left. The door opened at his touch. Her bed was wide and high, covered with satin, a gold-inlaid canopy above it, hung with silken draperies.
He placed Jo gently on the bed, bent over her, and kissed her once, lightly, on the lips.
“Sleep,” he said softly. “Sleep without dreams.”
Her eyes closed languidly and her head turned slightly on the satin pillow. He could see her arms go limp, her body relax. Her breathing slowed to the placid regular rhythm of deep slumber. He stood at the edge of the bed and gazed silently at her, a beautiful human animal, and part of his mind saw her as an alien creature, like an exotic specimen in an exhibit.
“I’ve got to leave you now,” Stoner whispered to her sleeping form. “You’ll be in no danger once they know I’ve gone. And there’s so much I need to learn, so much I’ve got to see and understand, before I can come back to you.”
Still, he lingered. Part of him wanted, more than anything, to stay with her and forget everything else. But he knew that could not be. There was too much to be done, too many dangers to face and questions to answer, and it was time that he started on his quest.
“I’ll come back to you, Jo,” he whispered. “I promise you that.”
CHAPTER 15
Getting away from the house was easier than Stoner had anticipated. He went down to the garage, which was underneath the patio. Electronic alarms guarded the doors and windows, and infrared motion sensors kept watch against any movement inside the shadowy garage itself. Stoner walked calmly to the smallest of the five autos in the garage, a sleek red Ferrari, not too different in styling from Richards’s convertible.
The overhead lights snapped on, and a man’s deep voice challenged, “Who’s there?”
Stoner looked over to the door that connected with the house and saw a young, lean Italian in shirt-sleeves framed by the doorway. He held a heavy-looking pistol in his left hand.
“It must have been the cat,” Stoner called to him. “The alarm’s very sensitive, isn’t it.”
The youngster stepped down onto the cement floor and walked slowly between two of the cars toward Stoner. The hand holding the gun slowly dropped to his side.
“The cat?” His lean face had a day’s stubble across its jaw. His dark eyes were flinty with suspicion. “There are no cats in here.”
Stoner smiled at him. “Oh. I must have been mistaken.”
“What are you doing down here?”
“I need the Ferrari. Do you know the combination for it?”
The guard squeezed his eyes shut, like a schoolboy struggling in a spelling contest. When he finally opened them, the suspicion was gone.
“Four fours,” he said.
“Thanks,” replied Stoner. “Could you open the door for me?”
Slowly, like a man at war within himself, the guard backed away from Stoner. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his pants, then turned and went to the plate on the wall that held the door controls. Stoner slid in behind the Ferrari’s steering wheel and punched the number four on the dashboard keypad four times. The electric motor hummed instantly.
The garage doors swung up. Stoner turned on the car’s headlights and put it in gear. He waved to the guard as he drove out onto the gravel driveway. The guard touched one finger to his brow, his face a picture of confusion and worry.
Not bothering to figure out if the car’s roof could be dissolved, Stoner drove out into the night, swift and silent. Wrought-iron gates loomed ahead in the glare of his headlights, but they opened silently, automatically, as he approached, then swung shut again behind him. There were no direction signs on the hillside, but he simply kept pointing downhill, toward the sea and the city hugging its shore. As he expected, a dark car bearing three men swung out behind him as he negotiated the first curve in the road beyond the villa’s gates.
It surprised him a little that the city was far from asleep. The lights that had looked so romantic from the villa’s patio blazed along Naples’s main thoroughfares. The streets were clogged with cars, all of them dodging impatiently through the traffic like a flotilla of New York taxi drivers, horns bleating angrily and brakes screeching constantly.
Stoner reveled in the people’s voices. Bel canto. He remembered that Naples was the city of song. But here the tenors and baritones and occasional bassos were the drivers of the cars, bellowing angrily at each other as they raced aggressively to be the first ones to reach the next stoplight. Even the women drove like maniacs. Stoner laughed and pulled the Ferrari up to the curb next to a sidewalk cafe. The black car that had been following him went by slowly; the men inside got a good long look at him. Stoner smiled at them. This late at night, they still affected dark glasses.
He got out of the car and studied the layout of the tiny tables and the people sitting at them. There were couples along the front windows of the cafe, most of them turned to face each other, not the traffic strolling by along the sidewalk. The tables nearest the curb were all occupied by men, some of them young and sleekly handsome, some of them balding and portly, all of them openly ogling the women who sauntered past. The men all seemed to be in groups of at least four, clustered around their little tables. None of th
e women were alone, either; they came in pairs or larger groups.
Grinning, Stoner marveled at the game they played, the men eyeing the girls and calling after them, but seldom leaving the protection of their comrades; the women parading by, but pretending either to be deaf and blind or to be insulted by the men’s attentions.
He found an unoccupied table off at the far end of the cafe’s stretch of sidewalk and ordered an espresso. The waiter was a human being, an old man, lean and gnarled as an olive tree, with a complexion the color of a tobacco stain.
“And bring an anisette with it,” Stoner added.
The waiter bowed.
Three men in sleek black windbreakers and skintight chinos came walking slowly along the sidewalk, peering through stylish smoked glasses at the people sitting at the tables. All three of them stared hard at Stoner, suddenly uncertain of themselves, then slowly walked on past. Stoner turned and watched them go down the street, knowing that they would not find him now.
The old waiter returned moments later with the demitasse of frothy black coffee, a sliver of lemon rind on the saucer, and a thimble-sized glass of clear liqueur. Stoner watched the byplay among the men and women as he sipped alternately at the espresso and the anisette. They made a good combination. One of the young males got to his feet, grinning at his companions, and started to follow a trio of girls down the street. In a few minutes he came back with one of the girls on his arm. He waved disdainfully at his erstwhile companions as he escorted the girl inside the cafe to find a table for themselves.
Stoner finished, and the waiter came to him with a scrap of paper. Smiling, he borrowed the waiter’s pen and wrote his name on the flimsy bill. The waiter frowned, stared at the signature, then looked sharply at Stoner. Stoner shrugged. The waiter shrugged. Stoner got to his feet and went back to the Ferrari.
It was almost dawn when he reached the airport. Parking the car at an empty taxi stand, where the police would quickly find it and track down its owner, he went inside and located the next flight out to Paris. It wasn’t for several hours, so Stoner strolled through the empty, echoing terminal, looking for an open newsstand. There were none. But he found the Alitalia lounge for first-class passengers. The sleepy-eyed woman at the reception desk made a smile for him and didn’t bother to ask to see his ticket.
A television set was flickering silently in one corner of the lounge. Stoner went to it and saw that it was tuned to an all-news channel. Next to the TV set was a rack of headphones with a dial control that offered translation into six different languages. Stoner took a pair of headphones, set them to English, and plopped into the deep, soft cushions of the chair directly in front of the screen.
The commentator’s voice was female, BBC English, dry and clipped. Stoner sat in growing horror as for three solid hours the television set showed nothing but disaster and tragedy.
The Central African War had spilled into Kenya as Zairian troops crossed the border in a series of coordinated attacks. Stoner watched jet planes swooping down to drop eggs of flaming death on villages and towns. Buildings exploded and burned, people ran in terror, clutching whatever meager possessions they could carry, children crying and stumbling as the planes wheeled and dived overhead like hunting falcons. Soldiers appeared on the screen, black men in helmets and mottled camouflage uniforms, firing automatic weapons into thick clumps of bushes. Rockets flashed and roared toward distant hills. Explosions of dirty black smoke sent back faint echoes.
The scene shifted. Grim-faced men in business suits seated around a polished table. The Englishwoman’s calm, flat words explained that the government of Nigeria was negotiating with representatives of Vanguard Industries and the International Peacekeeping Force for purchase of an energy dome to protect the city of Lagos from possible nuclear attack.
Another shift. Three young white people, two men and a woman, lay sprawled stiffly along the side of a dirt road. Peace Enforcers, the commentator’s voice told Stoner, ambushed by Ethiopian guerrillas in the hills of Eritrea. Stoner felt a pang of alarm. Hadn’t Richards told him that his daughter was married to a Peace Enforcer? Just what were they, anyway? he wondered.
But the images on the TV screen did not linger to explain. Famine and disease were sweeping the vast Indian subcontinent again, and an angry dark-faced man in Delhi charged that Vietnamese experiments in genetic warfare had caused the blight that had ruined the rice harvest and sent millions to their deaths. An equally angry Vietnamese stridently denied the charge and insisted that India was preparing to attack Vietnam to take the world’s attention away from the failure of the Indian government to feed its own people.
In Switzerland a special international conference of scientists announced that the growing incidence of cancer deaths worldwide was merely the result of modern medicine having all but eliminated the previous leading killers: heart disease, stroke, and viral infections. But demonstrators on the street outside the conference hall insisted that the scientists had discovered a cure for cancer, which they refused to share with “the ordinary people.”
Terrorists of the World Liberation Movement had struck at three separate places across the world during the previous twenty-four hours: A food-processing plant in Morocco had been gutted by an incendiary bomb. An electric power dam in the Canadian Rockies had been severely damaged by an explosion. And a trio of scientists, one American and two British, had been gunned down in front of their laboratory in Helsinki. A message left at a TV station in New York claimed that these “battles” had been fought by the World Liberation Movement’s “freedom fighters” to help “their brothers struggling in central Africa.”
And on. And on. Senseless murders and political assassinations. Sensational love affairs among the rich and famous. Pompous pronouncements by commentators who contradicted each other, and sometimes themselves.
Stoner watched it all, listened to every word, every inflection of voice, studied the expressions on the faces of the men and women, the tear-streaked faces of children torn from their homes by the pitiless fury of war, the greed and pride and self-centered stupidity of men and women in offices of high trust. How can they survive? Stoner wondered. How can the human race continue, day after day, year after year, with all this load of misery and hatred weighing it down?
Yet it was a rich world. Despite famines and wars, there was food enough to feed everyone. The human race was drawing resources from space now, mining the moon, smelting down entire asteroids rich in precious metals. But still there were famines. Still there were wars. Still the uncontrolled passions that led to murder and mass slaughter.
As Stoner watched, dawn brightened the sky. Sunlight filtered through the windows of the lounge. The cleaning robots that had been dutifully scouring the floors and polishing the furniture gave way to the morning’s shift of receptionists and servers. Travelers came in, some still rubbing sleep from their eyes, others tense and angry even this early in the morning.
Stoner glanced up from the TV screen to the monitor on the wall and saw that a flight was leaving for Paris in half an hour. He noted the gate, then got up and headed for the door, merely another traveler in the growing swell of passengers, completely unnoticed except by the receptionist, who smiled at this tall, rugged-looking man in maroon blazer and turtleneck shirt. He’s an American, I’ll bet, she said to herself. It wasn’t until many minutes after he had left the lounge that she realized that he had been carrying no luggage whatsoever; not even a shoulder bag.
Stoner made his way down to the gate where the Paris flight was departing, explained to the man handing out seat assignments that he had no money, no credit cards, no passport, no identification at all, but he would deeply appreciate a seat on this flight. The ticket agent frowned at first but soon smiled as Stoner spoke to him. He flicked his fingers over his computer keys and whisked out a boarding pass. After all, he admitted, this early flight is almost half-empty.
Stoner thanked him. The ticket agent wished him a pleasant flight. Stoner thanked him again a
nd headed for the jetway that led out to the plane. The ticket agent watched him for a moment, his eyes blinking and an expression of puzzlement on his face. Then another passenger came up to his counter and he turned his attention to her.
The plane’s interior was smaller than Stoner had expected, but as he took his assigned seat next to a window near the swept-back wing, he saw that the fuel truck filling the plane’s tanks bore the red H2 symbol of hydrogen, and its cylindrical body was rimed with a thin layer of frost. He remembered Richards telling him that trucks ran on hydrogen fuel now. So the plane did, too, and the extra tankage needed for the bulky fuel reduced the number of seats available for passengers. Hydrogen must be much cheaper than kerosene, he thought. And safer, he added hopefully.
The flight was swift, quiet, and uneventful. Most of the passengers dozed. Stoner ate the breakfast of juice, pastry, and coffee that the steward offered and gazed out the tiny window, watching the Mediterranean glittering under the climbing sun as the coast of Italy curved away and finally disappeared from sight.
The plane landed at Orly at 0715, less than an hour after leaving Naples. Stoner made his way past the French passport inspectors and customs agents with a pleasant smile and a few words. Inwardly he marveled at his newfound ability to get people to do what he wanted, but he was no longer surprised at it. You’re not entirely human anymore, he reminded himself as he strode empty-handed through the airport terminal. The question is, are you more than an ordinary human or less? Are these talents really yours now, or are you merely a host for an extraterrestrial visitor?
He wondered briefly why he had left Jo sleeping in her bed. It would have been easy to make love with her. It would have been pleasant for both of them. Pleasant. He mulled the word in his mind. Pleasant isn’t enough, he told himself. Not nearly enough. And the alien part of his mind shuddered at the thought of coupling like a primitive animal in heat.