Voyagers II - The Alien Within

by Ben Bova

  What is it that I’m supposed to do? he asked himself. Why have I been driven to leave Jo and turn my back on Kirill? Where am I heading, and why?

  He stared up at the plastic tiles of the ceiling, smudged with gray around the heating ducts, and tried to fathom it out on sheer willpower. Then he remembered that there was something he had been wanting to do. Like a deep-sea diver surfacing after a long time underwater, the memory of his children made its way up to the level of his conscious mind.

  Looking around, Stoner saw a single phone booth off in a corner of the waiting room. He went to it, sat on the padded bench, and closed the curved glass door. The phone screen immediately lit up, and a prerecorded Frenchwoman smilingly offered instructions on how to make local and long-distance calls.

  He needed a credit number, and there was no way to fool the phone’s computer into allowing him to make the call without one. Unlike human beings, the computer recognized only numbers and voice prints; Stoner could not talk it into doing what he wanted. Reluctantly, he asked the phone to make the call collect, to Mr. Douglas Stoner in Los Angeles, address and phone number unknown.

  Almost instantly the screen showed a young man’s face.

  “Doug?”

  But the man’s image ignored his question and said, with a fixed smile, “The Los Angeles-area directory lists seventy-three Douglas Stoners. Unless you can tell us the address or phone number of the particular Douglas Stoner you are seeking, I am afraid that the system cannot complete your collect call.”

  The young man looked nothing like Douglas, Stoner realized. His hair was light brown, his features so smoothly perfect that Stoner realized it was a computer simulation that was talking to him, not a real person.

  He stared at the smiling image for several moments, then tapped the key on the phone terminal that ended the connection.

  Elly, he thought. Richards told me she was married and living in New Zealand. He pictured the psychiatrist and the conversation they had had about his children. Then he touched the phone’s keyboard again.

  “A collect call to Mrs. Eleanor Stoner Thompson, in Christchurch, New Zealand.”

  In the flicker of an eye the screen printed: MESSAGES FOR WALLACE AND ELEANOR THOMPSON MAY BE FORWARDED THROUGH THE INTERNATIONAL PEACEKEEPING FORCE REGIONAL OFFICE IN SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, OR THROUGH IPF HEADQUARTERS IN OSLO, NORWAY.

  His jaw clenched with frustration, Stoner asked the phone to connect him with the Peace Enforcement headquarters in Oslo. After several minutes of talking with computer images, he finally got a dour-looking woman on the screen. Her hair was iron gray, her jaw long and stubborn. But she listened to Stoner’s plight.

  “It’s been twenty years since I’ve seen her,” he finished his story, “and now I can’t seem to track her down.”

  “Divorced twenty years ago?” the woman said, a glare of disapproval in her stern look.

  “That’s right.”

  “It took you long enough to decide you wanted to see her.” The woman’s English was excellent, with hardly a trace of Scandinavian twang.

  Stoner decided to accept her rebuke and look sheepish, rather than trying to explain. He had not mentioned Elly’s maiden name or his own. He had not told this austere woman that he had not been alive for eighteen of those twenty years. The woman’s expression softened a little, and she glanced down as she worked her computer keyboard.

  “Eleanor Thompson,” she read off a screen that was out of Stoner’s view. “Volunteer medical officer. Serving in Tanzania with husband, Major Wallace Thompson, International Peace Force.”

  “Tanzania,” Stoner echoed.

  “That’s in east Africa,” the woman said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t put you through to her. These circuits are for IPF calls only, not personal. And she’s probably out in the field somewhere, not at the regional headquarters in Dar es Salaam.”

  Nodding, Stoner thanked her again and cut the connection. He stepped out of the phone booth and walked slowly back to the couch where he had been sitting.

  Tanzania. The Central African War. It all clicked together. Now he knew where he was going, and what he had to do.

  “I don’t trust him,” An Linh said. “I don’t believe a word of what he says.”

  Her garment bag was spread across the bed, and she was packing the few bits of clothing she had brought with her from Hilo.

  Cliff Baker leaned against the doorjamb, watching her with a worried little smile on his face.

  “I don’t trust Madigan, either,” he admitted. “But I don’t see where we have much of a choice in the matter.”

  “Well, I do,” An Linh said. “I’m going back home and beg Nillson to give me my job back. It’s only been four days….”

  Baker crossed to the bed and sat on its edge. “You can’t do that, pet.”

  “Who says I can’t?”

  “Everett Nillson,” Baker replied, his voice low, almost as if he were afraid that the room had been bugged.

  An Linh thought of her meeting with Nillson and his strange request that she become a surrogate mother for his son. I can deal with that, she told herself. I can work it out with him—especially if he’ll help to revive my mother.

  Defiantly, she said to Baker, “Do you expect me to believe that line of organic fertilizer that Madigan handed us?”

  “That Nillson’s after your body? Yes, I believe it.”

  She tried to scowl at him, but he looked totally serious. He really cares about me, An Linh told herself. He’s really scared for my safety.

  “And he’s got the power to take what he wants,” Baker added. “You won’t get your job back unless you give Nillson what he wants. We’re both working for Madigan now, whether we like it or not.”

  “You, maybe,” An Linh insisted. “Not me.”

  He reached for her wrist. “Will you listen to me? You’re in danger.”

  “Nillson’s going to throw me into a dungeon and make me his slave, huh?”

  “If he wants to.”

  “And Madigan’s protecting me from that?”

  Baker nodded.

  An Linh pulled her hand away from him. “I don’t trust Archie Madigan,” she said. “Not for a second! And the worst part of this, Cliff, is that you do. You’re going along with him. Do you really believe all his bullshit?”

  He made himself grin at her. “Is it so bad?” Sweeping an outstretched arm around the blue-and-white bedroom, he asked, “I mean, even if it is bullshit, it’s a lot better than Hilo. All our bills are being paid, aren’t they? And we’re on the track of the biggest story of the century!”

  “While Father Lemoyne is dying in Honolulu.”

  “Madigan’s taking care of that. He promised us….”

  “Sure he did.”

  “We’ll do the documentary for Vanguard and auction it off to the networks.”

  “That’s fine for you, Cliff. But what about me?”

  “You’ll be part of it! The most important part! You’ll be the on-screen personality, the commentator. It’ll make you internationally famous! We’ll make a fortune!”

  She stared hard at him. “Cliff, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think that all you’re after is the money.”

  “I’m trying to protect you, love,” he said. “Whether you accept the fact or not, you’re in real danger.”

  She shook her head again, but it was more out of stubbornness than conviction. He was utterly serious, and Nillson had come across to her as—as what? An Linh asked herself. Threatening? Deviant? Maybe. But what she had seen in Nillson had been something else. Anger. And frustration. The kind of anger that a little boy feels when his mother thwarts him. Rage, that’s what it was. Barely controlled rage. In a man of Nillson’s power, such a passion could be dangerous.

  And what of Cliff? she asked herself. What of this man I love? Is he really trying to protect me, or is he so hot to get at the frozen-astronaut story that he’ll use me and Madigan and anyone else
who can be manipulated into helping him? No, she told herself. I can’t believe that. I mustn’t. Cliff loves me. He wants to protect me. He’s afraid of Nillson, and he’s playing off Madigan to protect me.

  But she heard herself say, “I can’t believe all this, Cliff.”

  Baker leaned back and stretched himself out on the rumpled bed. “Then just what do you believe, pet?”

  “I don’t know what to believe!” An Linh said. “It’s all been too much, too many things happening all at once….”

  His face took on a curious, quizzical expression. Hauling himself up off the bed, he glanced around the room, then held his hand out to her.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a walk. The fresh air will do us both some good.”

  She saw his brows raised pleadingly and realized that Cliff wanted to be out of the hotel suite, out on the streets where they could not be overheard. With a nod, An Linh took the only jacket she had with her from the garment bag and threw it across her shoulders.

  They walked up the Strand to Trafalgar Square, where Nelson’s column stood against the clean blue sky, flanked by proud British lions and thronging crowds of tourists from every corner of the world.

  “Remember when kids used to paint graffiti on monuments like that?” Baker asked over the hubbub of street vendors and hissing steam-powered busses.

  “I haven’t seen any for years, now that you mention it,” said An Linh. “A passing fad, I guess.”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “Those new polymer coatings that they spray onto the walls of buildings make it impossible for paint to stick to the surfaces.”

  He smiled tightly. “Don’t you believe it! The real truth is that there aren’t so many poor kids running around with nothing better to do.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it,” Baker said.

  They crossed the square, dodging the steam buses and honking black taxis, then pushed through the crowd sitting on the steps and enjoying the afternoon sunshine. An Linh wanted to sit for a while, too, but Baker insisted that they keep moving. He constantly glanced back over his shoulder as they made their way through the streets toward Piccadilly Circus.

  “Are we being followed?” An Linh asked him.

  “I don’t think so. Not close enough so they can pick up what we say, at least.”

  “And what is it that you want to say, Cliff? What do you want to tell me that couldn’t be said back in the hotel?”

  He hesitated, as if trying to form the right words in his mind before speaking.

  Finally, “There’s still plenty of graffiti in Africa, An Linh. And India. All through Asia and the poor island countries of the Pacific.”

  “In Cambodia, too,” she agreed.

  “Yes, in your homeland.”

  “France is my home, Cliff. I have no childhood memories of Cambodia.”

  “But it’s your real home, An Linh,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “It’s the home of your blood, your ancestry. You can’t stand there and tell me that it means nothing to you.”

  “When I was in Cambodia, doing the documentary, it was like…”

  “Yes?”

  She made a little shrug. “Well, it was sort of like visiting distant relatives. I knew everybody there was sort of related to me, but I had no real ties to them. No emotional ties, I mean.”

  “But you must have felt something,” he insisted.

  “I felt guilty, I guess.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Because I had so much and they were so poor. Because I knew I was going back to Paris in a couple of weeks, while the people I was taping would have to stay in their villages and their poverty.”

  “That’s just it,” he said, quickening their pace as they approached the heavier traffic of Piccadilly. “We have so much, and they have so little.”

  An Linh asked, “What’s all this got to do with…”

  He clutched her arm, almost hard enough to hurt. “There are people in this world who are working to change the balance of power, the balance of wealth.”

  “People? Who?”

  “Why should Nillson and Vanguard Industries have such enormous wealth? Why should the people of equatorial Africa be plunged into starvation and war?”

  He was practically dragging her along the street. An Linh pulled her arm free of his grasp and stopped walking. She saw a doorway with a small sign hanging above it that read “The Lion’s Roar.” Next to the door was an advertising poster urging, “Take COURAGE.”

  “I’m hungry,” An Linh said. “Buy me lunch.”

  Baker frowned.

  “This conversation is going to need Courage,” she insisted.

  Reluctantly, he pushed the door open and they stepped into the smoky, noisy pub. Finding an empty booth toward the rear, An Linh slid herself in on the wooden bench while Baker went to the bar to order sausages and two pints of Courage lager. The pub was crowded with late afternoon customers, dozens of conversations buzzing simultaneously, good-hearted laughter, and a constant flow of people in and out the front door. In an American bar, An Linh knew, there would always be at least one man who would try to pick her up. Here in the pub, none of the men paid her any attention. Behind her relief at that, she felt a slight twinge of annoyance, but she knew that Cliff would see things very differently.

  He struggled through the crowd to their booth, holding the plate of sausages and two mugs of beer high over his head as he squeezed past the men clustered around the bar.

  Sliding in next to An Linh, he grinned boyishly.

  “I guess nobody’s going to eavesdrop on us in here,” he admitted.

  She smiled back and took a sip of the beer. “Now what’s all this about poor people and rich people?”

  Baker glanced around the crowded pub before answering. Hunching even closer to her, he dropped his voice to a husky whisper. “There’s an organization…it’s international in scope, made up of people from every part of the world….”

  “Including Australia?”

  He nodded. “Including me. We need your help, love. In return, we can protect you from the likes of Nillson and Vanguard Industries.”

  He was serious, she saw.

  “You need my help to do what?”

  “To find the frozen astronaut,” said Baker. “We want him.”

  “But why?”

  “Do you realize the knowledge he’s got stored in his brain?” Baker’s voice did not rise in volume, but it grew more intense, agitated. “I’ve listened to the tapes of his conversations with a psychiatrist….”

  An Linh felt a shock of surprise. “Then you knew he’d been revived!”

  “Yes. We did.”

  “When you hatched the idea to do a documentary on Father Lemoyne—you knew?”

  “We had the tapes. We had to make certain they were authentic. The psychiatrist might have been a double agent.”

  “What is this organization?” she demanded. “Who belongs to it? Where does their money come from?”

  Strangely, he seemed to relax. Grinning at her, Baker said, “The reporter’s instincts come right to the front with you, don’t they?”

  “I need to know about this, Cliff.”

  Baker lowered his voice even further. “You’ve heard of them. It’s called the World Liberation Movement.”

  “But they’re terrorists!”

  “No they’re not,” he snapped in a hissing whisper. “Not entirely. They’ve performed a few acts of sabotage and some assassinations, yes. But not as many as the media claims they’ve done.”

  “A few?…” An Linh’s mind was spinning. “Cliff, they blew up that shopping complex in Madrid! And the airliner…”

  “We get blamed for a lot of things that we never did,” he insisted. “And nobody gives us credit for the good things we have done.”

  “What good things?”

  “In the Central African War, for example. We saved the Ebos from being exterminated by the Nigerian army. We supplie
d the weapons the Ugandans needed to defend themselves.”

  “But how? Why?”

  “I can’t tell you. A lot of it I don’t know myself. They keep a very tight security wrap over everything, for obvious reasons.”

  “But what is the World Liberation Movement trying to accomplish?”

  “A redistribution of the world’s wealth.”

  An Linh leaned her head back against the wooden wall of the booth. “Is that all?”

  “It’s no joke, pet. This is for real.”

  “A redistribution of the world’s wealth,” she echoed.

  “And power,” Baker added.

  “And power. Of course power. Power is what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 20

  All that day Stoner wandered the streets of Paris, thinking, questioning, asking himself if the decision he had made was the right one.

  He walked the broad avenues in the morning hours, down the Champs Élysées to the Tuileries and into the Louvre. He edged his way through the early throng that crowded around La Giaconda, the Mona Lisa, and stared long at the enigmatic smile of that immortalized young woman. He listened to people speaking in a dozen different languages, chattering like the monkeys they so closely resembled. He saw that the painting was sealed behind thick plastic and roped off so that no one could get close to it. Stern-faced guards flanked the serene portrait. Like monkeys, the people had an innate urge to stretch out their hands and touch the picture.

  He understood all their simian gibbering, no matter what the language.

  In Japanese, “Why does she smile so?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  “Nonsense! Is that all you women think about?”

  “I read it in a book.”