Voyagers II - The Alien Within

by Ben Bova

  “No. Not dead.”

  “You offered your body as a hostage,” Appert realized. “The world could not allow you to drift away on the alien ship. Someone had to rescue you.”

  Stoner nodded. “And to rescue me, they had to go out and get the alien spacecraft before it drifted out of the solar system altogether.”

  “I see,” said Nicole. “So you forced them to bring the alien ship back to Earth.”

  “It’s in orbit a couple of hundred miles above us,” Stoner said.

  “And you are back among us.” Nicole smiled at him.

  “Yes, but…” The words almost froze on his tongue. “But I feel almost like an alien myself. This world has changed a lot since I left it.”

  Appert glanced at his wife, then turned back to Stoner. “There have been many changes, that is true. Most of them have been very good. We no longer live under the threat of nuclear annihilation.”

  “So I understand.”

  “And we have the energy of the stars now,” Nicole said.

  “Fusion power, you mean.”

  “Yes, fusion,” said Appert.

  Stoner saw that his old friend looked uncomfortable. “What is it, Claude? What’s bothering you?”

  “You won’t mind if I ask a personal question?”

  “Of course not.”

  “We are delighted to have you here, Keith. Delighted that you are alive and well. But—you call suddenly at an early hour, you arrive without luggage, without even a razor or toothbrush. You give every appearance of being a fugitive.”

  “We are concerned for your safety,” Nicole added. “Are you in trouble? Can we help?”

  Stoner laughed softly and saw the Apperts go from concern to surprise to relief, all in the flicker of an eye.

  “I’m not a fugitive from justice,” he told them. “I merely ran away from the people who wanted to hold on to me so that they could study me. I got tired of being a laboratory specimen.”

  “Ah.” Appert leaned back in his chair, understanding.

  “These are the same people who revived you?” Nicole asked.

  “Yes. They have the feeling that they own me. I feel differently.”

  “I see.”

  “Who are these people?” Appert asked.

  “A research group—part of Vanguard Industries.”

  “Vanguard.” Appert seemed impressed.

  “You know of them?”

  “Perhaps the largest multinational corporation in the world,” Nicole said. “Bigger even than Eurogenetics or Philips/Nestlé.”

  Now Stoner felt impressed. “I didn’t know that.”

  Appert gestured with one hand. “Vanguard has an annual budget that is almost as large as that of the government of France. It is a huge corporation.”

  “They will be looking for you very hard, I think,” said Nicole.

  “I suppose they will,” Stoner admitted.

  “You will be safe here, though,” Nicole assured him. Her husband nodded.

  “But I can’t stay for long,” Stoner blurted.

  “Why not?”

  The idea formed in his mind as he spoke the words, as if the information were being transmitted to him from some distant point of origin.

  “I’ve got to see one of the men who worked with me, eighteen years ago. A Russian. His name is Kirill Markov.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Jo awoke knowing that Stoner had gone.

  She sat up in her bed, still dressed in the long gown she had worn at dinner. She felt more rested and refreshed than she had in years. And she knew that Stoner had left her.

  For nearly half an hour she sat there, waiting for the fury that would inevitably rise up inside her. But instead she felt a different emotion. She looked into the mirror above the dressing table on the wall opposite the bed and saw that she was smiling cheerfully.

  “He’s free,” she said aloud. “After all these years, he’s free. On his own, like a boy playing hooky from school.”

  A boy worth a billion dollars, she reminded herself. The smile faded from her lips. Jo slouched back onto the pillows and started thinking about how she should deal with her husband and the others in Vanguard Industries who would try to destroy her.

  She showered quickly and put on a business suit, planning ahead as she dressed, picturing the attitudes of Nillson and the other board members. After a quick breakfast of coffee and fruit juice, she phoned Rome and instructed her office there to send a plane to Naples for her, then had her darkly brooding majordomo drive her to the Naples airport.

  Security at the villa is gone, she thought grimly. They know about the place now.

  “Salvatore,” she called to her majordomo, who was driving the limousine.

  He glanced up at the rearview mirror to see her. “Sì, signora?”

  In Italian, Jo instructed him to sell the villa and find a different one, farther south, in Calabria, perhaps, or on the Adriatic coast of Apulia.

  Salvatore said nothing. He was a man of few words, a distant cousin of Jo’s whom she trusted with the faith of blood.

  She watched his eyes in the mirror, then got a better idea.

  “Salvatore, don’t sell the villa. Keep it for yourself and your family as your own home. But find me another place farther south. And on the sea.”

  Salvatore actually turned to look at her over his shoulder. “For myself and my family, signora?”

  “In appreciation of your loyal service,” Jo said.

  The limo wavered slightly, and he turned back to give his full attention to driving. Jo smiled. That had surprised him; even broken through his rigid self-control a smidgen. But he deserves the villa, especially if it helps keep him loyal. And besides, she thought, if I don’t sell it, everybody will think that I still use it.

  When they got to the airport and threaded their way through the maze of roads to the area where private planes were hangared, Jo saw a sleek, swept-wing jet painted gleaming white with the stylized green V of Vanguard Industries emblazoned on its tail already waiting for her. Salvatore actually kissed her hand as she left the limousine, a thoroughly unusual burst of emotion, for him.

  The supersonic flight to New York took three hours, which Jo used the way she would use any ordinary morning in her office. With a phone terminal and access to her computer files, she conducted business as usual. And ordered Archie Madigan to meet her in Greenwich. His private secretary said he was in London, but she would reach him and have him in Jo’s office before the end of the day.

  It was not quite seven A.M. when the jet taxied up to the Vanguard Industries’ hangar at Greenwich Airport. Another limousine was waiting for Jo, and she was whisked quickly and silently to the Vanguard corporate headquarters, an imposing black tower of anodized meteoric steel, processed in Vanguard’s zero-gravity orbital mill, and long columns of smoked glass, set back on the wide, tree-lined lawn of an old estate.

  It was still officially the corporation’s headquarters, although Nillson had moved all the officers to the laboratory complex in Hilo. For the sake of security. Demonstrators could picket this brooding tower in Greenwich, but terrorists would not find any of the corporation’s key people there to be kidnapped. The Hawaii site was easier to defend. Hilo was six thousand miles away from teeming New York City; Greenwich a mere ten.

  Having spent the flight across the Atlantic tending to ordinary business affairs, the first thing Jo did once she got into her office was to phone Gene Richards in Hawaii. The psychiatrist was not at the lab complex, said the computer voice of his telephone terminal. Jo instructed the computer to find him and have him call her.

  Her office here, near the shrine of Wall Street, was more orthodox than the one she had in Hilo. It was a large room, big enough for a long conference table surrounded by eight high-backed leather chairs, a wide couch flanked by end tables, and four armchairs. Jo sat behind a desk of dark Brazilian cherrywood, in a custom-fashioned leather swivel chair that she always found just the slightest bit uncomfortable. Th
e floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, made to order and a gift of the new Iranian government, which owed its rise to power to Vanguard Industries’ generous financing and paramilitary assistance. The walls were hung with neomodernist paintings: mostly abstracts, which Jo abhorred. Doors led to a fully stocked bar she never used, a mirror-walled bathroom, and a small but comfortable bedroom complete with a waterbed.

  On the other side of the room there was a single door that connected with the office of the chairman of the board. As Jo leaned back in her chair, waiting for the phone’s computer system to track down Richards, that door opened and Nillson stepped through.

  “Ah. You are here.”

  Jo nodded to him. “I’m here.”

  “Finished your fling with the astronaut?” Nillson walked slowly across the office and settled himself in one of the armchairs facing her desk, lanky legs and arms folding like a giraffe settling down on the ground. The expression on his face was unreadable: a slight, twisted smile that might have been anything from mild amusement to buried rage.

  “It wasn’t a fling,” Jo said, suddenly feeling weary. “I took him out of the labs for security reasons.”

  “Security?” Nillson’s white eyebrows rose a centimeter.

  “I found out about the television project you okayed.”

  “Did you?”

  Deliberately keeping her voice casual, Jo asked, “Your ex-director of corporate public relations—did she find out you’re impotent?”

  Splotches of angry red appeared on his pallid cheeks. “I am not impotent!”

  Smiling sweetly, Jo said, “Medically, maybe. But what they have to go through before you can get it up…”

  Voice trembling, Nillson said, “I didn’t come in here to discuss my sex life with you.”

  “Nor mine,” Jo snapped. “I took Stoner out of the labs because the place was starting to leak like the Titanic. And I don’t like you playing at being the jealous husband.”

  With an obvious effort, Nillson fought down the anger that had seized him. His hands unclenched, his face lost its color.

  “All right. So you took Stoner off to a safe house,” he said, his voice barely under control. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  “I was going to—but not over the phone. I made a special trip here to see you, but you chose to stay in Hilo.”

  “I had special business to take care of.”

  Shrugging, Jo said, “Who was she?”

  He ignored that. “So where is the illustrious Dr. Stoner now? Where have you got him hidden?”

  Jo hesitated while several different possibilities whirled through her mind. Finally she chose the only one that she could.

  “He got away,” she said.

  Nillson blinked.

  “I don’t know how he did it, but he walked out of my house last night and disappeared.”

  Through clenched teeth her husband grated, “That’s…not…possible.”

  “Were you having my villa watched?” Jo asked.

  “Of course not. You’ve never seen fit to tell me where it is, remember?”

  “You never even tried to find out?”

  “Where is Stoner?”

  Jo shook her head. “I don’t know. That’s why I’ve come back here, to organize a search for him.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “And I don’t believe that it wasn’t your people who were watching the villa—” She stopped abruptly, then realized, “Unless it was the Russians.”

  “Russians? Why would they…?”

  “For the same reason we want him. The same reason the competition wants him. God knows how much of the alien’s secrets he’s got locked inside his brain.”

  “And you let him just walk away from you?” Nillson’s voice was rising, the angry color coming back to his cheeks.

  Jo felt glad that there was a desk separating them. She knew how violent he could be.

  “Ev,” she said as soothingly as she knew how, “he’s not an ordinary human being. You have no idea of the”—she groped for the word—“the power he has.”

  “Power? What are you talking about?”

  “Ask Richards, back at Hilo. Something happened to Stoner while he was in the alien spacecraft. He’s different now…different from any human being you’ve ever met.”

  “Where is he?” Nillson repeated.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Why are you hiding him from me? What are you trying to pull?”

  “I’m not hiding him,” Jo said, hearing her own voice rise. But not with anger. It was fear that was moving her now. “I’m trying to find him!”

  Nillson got to his feet and glared down at her. “We’ll see. We’ll just damned well see!”

  And he strode out of her office. Jo slumped back in her chair. She knew what he was capable of, and she knew she had to take steps to protect herself from him.

  The Russians. Could they have been snooping around the villa? It had been months since she had talked with Kirill Markov. More than a year, she thought. She touched the phone terminal’s keypad and asked the machine to connect her with Markov, wherever he was.

  It wasn’t until well after lunch hour that Jo realized neither Markov nor Gene Richards had answered her calls. Checking with the phone, she heard the same computer answer to both her queries:

  “Unlocated as yet. Still trying to reach him.”

  At least Archie Madigan showed up, late in the afternoon. The lawyer looked as if he had just showered, shaved, and put on his best Wall Street high-collared imitation Mandarin tunic.

  “Jo, my dear, your message sounded urgent,” he said as he dropped onto the couch by the bedroom door.

  Staying behind her desk despite its distance from the couch, Jo replied, “Have you heard that Stoner’s disappeared?”

  “Got away from you, did he?”

  “He certainly did.”

  Madigan shook his head as if in disbelief. “I thought you’d have him all buttoned up in a well-guarded place.”

  “I did. But he just walked out.”

  “Walked?”

  “Actually he took one of my cars. It was found at the airport.”

  “In sunny Napoli?”

  She nodded wearily. His affectations could get tiresome.

  “You’ve started a search for him?”

  “Yes. Of course. But it isn’t going to be easy.”

  Madigan’s brows knit slightly. “How far can he get? He doesn’t have any money on him, and no credit, no ID. He’s practically naked as a newborn baby.”

  Briefly, Jo debated telling Madigan about the strange power she sensed in Stoner. Instead, she said, “If he’s been kidnapped by the competition—or by the Russians…”

  “You think so?”

  “I don’t know! Apparently he just talked his way past my own guards and drove my car to the airport. But I don’t know if he’s acting by himself or if he had help.”

  “You think he might have deliberately gone off with somebody?”

  “If he did, it’s with Markov.”

  “The Russian.”

  “They were friends back at Kwajalein.”

  “But you don’t really believe that, do you?” Madigan probed. “From the look on your lovely face, I’d say you think he went off by himself, and that scares you.”

  She stared at Madigan for a moment, then admitted, “You’re right. And it does scare me. I want to get Gene Richards in here. He’s the one who’s worked closest with Stoner. I want a complete report on what he’s found, and I want him to give it to me in person.”

  Madigan put on his most doleful expression. “That’s not going to be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  The lawyer sighed. “Dr. Richards met with an accident this morning. On the highway. Jumped the lane divider and ran into a truck at extremely high speed.”

  “He’s dead?”

  Madigan nodded.

  Jo immediately said, “Then I want his notes, his tape
s, his entire files—everything! I want them here, by tomorrow morning.”

  “That might not be so easy to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Getting slowly to his feet and walking toward Jo’s desk, Madigan said, “Your husband ordered all of Richards’s files be sent to him, as soon as he heard about the accident.”

  Jo felt her lips compressing into a tense, hard line.

  “Strange thing,” Madigan went on. “Your husband had a long meeting with Richards yesterday. Hours and hours, they were closeted in Ev’s office together. Then this morning Richards goes out, gets into his car, and takes off. An hour later we got the word that he had been killed.”

  “And Everett has his files.”

  “Everything.”

  So he knew whatever Richards knew, Jo realized. Or he will as soon as he reads the files. He’ll know more about Keith than I do.

  “The truck that killed Richards…” she started to ask.

  “It wasn’t one of ours,” Madigan answered before she could frame the question. “And there was no mechanical foul play with the poor man’s car, either.”

  None reported, Jo corrected silently. Everett had him killed. And he’s furious enough now to do the same to me.

  CHAPTER 18

  The airport was shrouded in fog, and Stoner doubted that a small plane would be able to land safely. He glanced at the wristwatch Claude Appert had loaned him. Almost midnight. Markov’s plane was probably already overhead, circling.

  But Stoner could hear nothing. The little airport seemed deserted, empty. The lights marking the edges of its one paved runway gleamed weakly in the cold gray fog. The cement ramp on which Stoner stood, just outside the airport’s brick administration building, was slick and puddled. The bricks dripped moisture.

  Stoner pulled the collar of his trench coat closer around his throat. The fog’s cold fingers reached for him, wormed their way to his skin, chilled him. He shivered slightly, remembering the cold that had ended his earlier life. He did not like the cold. Or the darkness of this night.

  Yet he smiled. How like Kirill, he thought. As melodramatic as a Victorian temperance play. Markov the romantic, picking midnight at a fog-shrouded airport miles out in the French countryside for their first meeting in eighteen years.