Voyagers IV - The Return

by Ben Bova

  His spirits sank. Then he brightened as he realized, I’ll get to talk to Holly! She’s the chief administrator of the habitat. I’d have to talk to her about an investigation!

  But he heard himself say, “It’d be better for me to go there in person. I’d get better results, don’t you think?”

  Her widening smile told him that she saw right through him. “No, Mr. Tavalera, I don’t agree. First, you are not a trained investigator. It would be better for you to ask Goddard’s security people to conduct the investigation. Second, I prefer to have you here, working with me.”

  “Working with you?”

  “Yes. While the idea of a cabal of Goddard’s scientists perpetrating a hoax on us is a possible answer to our puzzle, it is only one possibility. I want you to assist me in tracking down some of the others.”

  “But you just said I’m not a trained investigator.”

  “That’s all right. You’ll work with me and do what I tell you.”

  “And my job back home?”

  “That will all be taken care of. I am the personal assistant of Bishop Zebulon Craig. I can get you reassigned to my staff. No problem.”

  “I’ll have to move here?”

  “You’ll move to wherever I am, Mr. Tavalera. Wherever this task takes us.”

  “But my home’s in Little Rock. My mother’s there and she expects me—”

  “You will go home when this task is successfully finished, Mr. Tavalera. Not before.”

  “But why me? Why can’t you pick on somebody else?”

  “You have been chosen. The Lord quite often works in mysterious ways.”

  “In other words, I don’t have any choice, do I?”

  “No, Mr. Tavalera. I’m afraid you don’t. You will work with me until we solve this puzzle.”

  Whether I like it or not, he groused to himself.

  “Don’t look so unhappy,” she said with a little laugh. “Once we find the answers we’re looking for, I can see to it that you are allowed to return to Goddard.”

  “You can?” he blurted.

  “Once we find the answers, Mr. Tavalera. Once we find the answers.”

  CHAPTER 10

  His mother looked distressed.

  “They told me you’d been arrested,” she said, nearly in tears.

  Tavalera sat in a cubicle in the New Morality’s Rocky Mountain base and said to the image on the desktop screen, “No, Ma. I’ve been drafted, that’s all. Not arrested.”

  There was a noticeable lag before her response reached him, longer than the normal delay in the relay of a message from a commsat in geosynch orbit, Tavalera thought.

  “Drafted? Into the army?”

  “No, Ma. I’m on a special assignment for a branch of the New Morality.”

  “What do they want you for?”

  Good question, he thought. “Damned if I know.”

  His mother blinked at him. “What did you say? I saw your lips move, but the sound didn’t come through.”

  Keeryst, Tavalera said to himself. They must have a censoring circuit blocking out words on their disapproved list. Or maybe a live censor listening to every word we say. Probably’d block out anything I might say about this work I’m supposed to be doing, too.

  “When will you come back home?” his mother asked.

  “Tomorrow. I’m staying here overnight and then they’ll fly me home tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  He had to tell her. “It’ll just be to pack some clothes and things, Ma. Then I go out on my new assignment.”

  “You’ll be leaving again? For where?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “But they can’t just pull you this way and that way! First New Orleans and now you don’t even know where!”

  “Yes, they can, Ma.” Silently he added, They can do any goddamned thing they want to.

  The next day a different pair of agents flew him back to Little Rock and caused a neighborhood sensation when they landed their rattling, roaring tilt-rotor in the middle of the street, right in front of Tavalera’s house. Pedestrians walking their pets gaped; people came out of their houses and stood at their front doors, staring.

  He packed his travel bag as quickly as he could while his mother wept and bombarded him with a thousand questions he couldn’t answer. At last he kissed her good-bye, promised to call her every day (if he could, he told himself), and then sprinted gratefully back to the waiting tilt-rotor, its big rotor arms whooshing as they swung lazily. Once he got aboard, the ship whisked him to Atlanta and the headquarters of the New Morality.

  The headquarters complex lay in the heart of the city, a sprawling congregation of buildings centered on the massive neo-Gothic cathedral that stood on the site of the modest white clapboard church where the movement had begun, nearly a century earlier. That old wood-frame church had been taken down board by board and then lovingly restored inside the gleaming geodesic dome of a new museum that stood at the edge of the complex’s soaring glass and steel skyscrapers. The towers held the offices, meeting rooms, hospital, hotels, and auditoriums of what had become a supremely powerful international organization.

  The tilt-rotor had touched down on a spacious grassy field off to one side of the complex of buildings. His escorts had given Tavalera a pocket phone programmed with the location of the office he was to report to and warned him that the phone was programmed only for the GPS channel. They pointed him in the right direction, then left him alone. The tilt-rotor zipped away, clattering noisily. Heading for their next victim, Tavalera said to himself.

  He was alone for the first time in days, he realized. Then he figured that the pocket phone they’d given him showed exactly where he was and if he didn’t follow its instructions to the office, a couple more “escorts” would show up and make certain he went where they’d told him to go. With a shrug of acquiescence, he started off.

  The headquarters complex was like a big university campus, Tavalera thought as he followed the GPS directions on the tiny screen of the pocket phone. The walkways were thick with people; none of them were using pocket phones. They must be outlawed, Tavalera figured. Nearly silent electric autos glided along the gently winding streets. He hadn’t seen Sister Angelique since leaving the Rockies. Now he walked through the bright morning sunshine to the office where he’d been told to report for work.

  It was hot, even this early on the February morning. Tavalera felt surprisingly good, though, despite the fact that he’d been picked up and hauled around the country like a sack of potatoes, moved this way and that without any recourse or say in the matter. That didn’t bother him too much, because he was thinking about the possibility that he might, he just might, be able to get back to the massive habitat Goddard, back to the woman he loved, back to the life he had foolishly left behind.

  At last he found the building where his office was located, in the maze of glass and steel towers, and even found the office on the fourteenth floor that he was told to report to.

  “We’ve been expecting you,” said the young woman behind the reception desk. She wore her light brown hair in a stylish sweep down one side of her attractive face, even though her clothing looked more like a dark cleric’s robe than the kind of fashionable dress that a good-looking young woman would wear. She spoke in a sibilant near whisper.

  Tavalera followed her softly voiced instructions down a long corridor, past three cross corridors, and finally a right turn at the fourth crossing. The corridors were thickly carpeted; the soft pastel walls seemed to absorb sound. Men and women walked past him, smiled, and nodded; some even said, “Good morning.” All in whispers. It began to make him feel nervous.

  At last he found the room he was looking for. Its door was open. Windowless, but all four walls glowed with smart screens showing the palm-bough symbol of the New Morality. There was no desk, but a pair of comfortable-looking armchairs covered in butterscotch fabric sat in the middle of the room, with a low table between them.

  Tavalera ste
pped in and looked around. Nothing else in sight. The door swung shut and clicked. One wall broke into a life-sized image of Sister Angelique, sitting at a desk in another office somewhere. She broke into her bright, pleased smile.

  “Good morning, Mr. Tavalera. Are you ready to begin God’s work?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Tavalera sank into one of the armchairs.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Good. I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you in person this morning. This interactive program will tell you all you need to know, though, and get you started.”

  “Interactive program, huh?” Tavalera had used them before, when he worked on scoopships at Jupiter.

  “Interactive program. The program will respond to your vocal questions and commands. It will also lay out your work assignment for the day.”

  “So I’m talking to a digital program.”

  Her image froze for an eyeblink. Then she replied, “You are speaking to a digital avatar, Mr. Tavalera. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be with you in person this morning, but I am tied up on important business elsewhere.”

  Meaning I’m not all that important, Tavalera said to himself.

  “Your first assignment is to contact the habitat Goddard in Saturn orbit and request that their leaders start an investigation into the possibility that our message from the alleged starship is a hoax perpetrated by a person or persons aboard the habitat.”

  Tavalera nodded to the image. Contact Holly, he thought, his pulse thumping faster. Contact Holly.

  The planet Saturn orbits ten times farther from the Sun than Earth does, which means that it takes communications—though moving at the speed of light—more than an hour to travel from one world to the other, even when the two planets are at the closest distance. There is no way to have a conversation when there is more than a two-hour lag between sending a message and receiving its answer.

  So Tavalera leaned back in the softly yielding armchair and called out, “Message to Ms. Holly Lane, chief administrator of the habitat Goddard.”

  The wall screen facing him printed out his words, white against a deep blue background. The data bar running across the bottom of the screen showed the current time lag between Earth and Saturn: one hour, forty-two minutes.

  Suddenly Tavalera’s throat felt dry. He hadn’t seen Holly since he’d left Goddard, nearly five months earlier. He’d promised her that he’d call her regularly, but once he’d arrived on Earth the government’s telecommunications office informed him that only authorized agencies were allowed to contact the habitat and Tavalera was not only an unauthorized agency, he was nothing more than an individual citizen, with no access to interplanetary communications allowed.

  But now it’s different, he thought. Now I’m working for the bastards.

  “Holly,” he finally said. “It’s me. Raoul. I wasn’t able to call you earlier; they wouldn’t let me. But now I’m working for—”

  He hesitated. Who the hell am I working for? he wondered. The federal government? The New Morality? Does it make any difference? They’re all tangled up together.

  “I’ve been drafted to work for the New Morality,” he said. “They’re worried about a message that’s been beamed to Earth from a spacecraft that’s entered the solar system from interstellar space. At least, that’s the way it looks. Far as I’m concerned, I’m checking on the possibility that it could be some kind of joke—a hoax that’s being pulled off by some of the bright guys on Goddard.”

  Again he stopped. That’s kind of impersonal, he thought. I wonder how she’s doing. She said she’d wait for me to come back, but that was months ago. I thought I’d be on my way back by now, not stuck in some office in Atlanta doing God’s friggin’ work.

  He closed his eyes and pictured Holly: her flaring cheekbones and square, stubborn jaw; her sparkling brown eyes, her light brown hair that framed her face like a soft caress. Does she still love me? he asked himself. How can I explain to her why I haven’t been able to start back to her?

  “Holly, I had hoped to be on my way back to Goddard by now, but they won’t let me go. I love you, honey, and I want to be with you. But there’s something weird going on here, with this message and a spacecraft supposedly from beyond the solar system. The thing just disappeared! They tracked it as far as Jupiter and then it disappeared. And then they got this message from somebody who’s been dead for more’n a hundred years, claiming he’s been out among the stars.

  “That’s what makes me think it’s a hoax, Holly. Could you look into it? See if some of the scientists in the habitat are trying to have some fun by scaring the bejesus out of the authorities here. They’re really worried about this, honey. I mean, whatever it is, it’s making the Northern Lights flash every night, clear down to Little Rock and probably farther south, as well.

  “Please return this call. Please let me see you, talk to you. I miss you, Holly. I want to be with you. I really do. They say if I help them figure out what this business is all about, then they’ll let me come back to Goddard. That’s what I’m praying for. Please answer me, Holly. Please.”

  Then he took a breath and told the computer, “Transmit.”

  Sister Angelique’s face reappeared on the wall screen. “This program has an automatic editing subroutine. It’s editing your message now. Please stand by.”

  “Editing?” Tavalera scowled at Sister Angelique’s smiling image, immobile on the screen. I should have known. They won’t let anything go out until they’ve looked at it. And I went and spilled my guts to her.

  Sister Angelique’s image stirred to a simulacrum of life. “Your message has been edited for security, Mr. Tavalera. You may review the edited version before transmitting it to habitat Goddard.”

  Tavalera read the edited text. To his surprise, most of his personal remarks were included. What they took out was any mention of his being forced to remain on Earth—and his brief reference to the authorities’ being frightened by the message from the starship.

  “Okay,” he said, licking his lips. “Transmit it.”

  Nervously kneading his thighs, Tavalera told himself that he had nothing to do now for a couple of hours except wait for Holly’s reply. If she replies. If she gets the message. What if the same wiseasses who’ve pulled off this stunt intercept my message and erase it? The possibility alarmed him. Then he thought, If I can show Sister Angelique and this Bishop Craig or whoever her boss is that the message was blocked, then maybe they’ll send me to Goddard in person to snoop around. Yeah! They’d have to! Suddenly he began to hope that the message would be intercepted.

  How long will I have to wait? he wondered. Two–three hours, at least. Maybe four. If I don’t get an answer in four hours I’ll tell Angelique that the message’s been blocked.

  Four hours. Then I call Sister Angelique.

  He was very surprised when the wall screen began to glow a mere seventeen minutes after he’d transmitted his message. And even more shocked when the image on the screen shaped up to be not Holly Lane or anyone in the Goddard habitat. Not even Sister Angelique.

  It was the bearded, imposing face of Keith Stoner.

  “I’m not a hoax, Mr. Tavalera,” said Stoner, his voice strong and calm. “I assure you, I am very real.”

  CHAPTER 12

  And Tavalera found himself in what looked like the bridge of a spacecraft. He gulped and felt his stomach sink within him, as if he were dropping from an enormous height. He was still seated, but now his chair was a padded recliner with a footrest. Broad panels of blinking lights stretched around him; instruments beeped softly. Above the panels was a wide window that looked out on the dazzling blue sphere of Earth, hanging in space, flecked with marching rows of brilliant white clouds.

  Standing before him was Keith Stoner, tall, broad shouldered, his measured smile showing strong white teeth.

  “I’m not a hoax, Raoul,” Stoner repeated. “You don’t mind if I call you Raoul, do you?”

  Tavalera couldn’t find his voice. H
is heart was thundering beneath his ribs. He felt dizzy, almost sick. The compartment smelled strange, different from any spacecraft he’d ever been in.

  “And it’s pretty obvious that I’m not dead, either,” Stoner said, his smile fading.

  “Wha . . . where are we?” Tavalera gasped. “What’s happening? How did you . . . ?” He tried to push himself up out of the recliner, but his arms were too weak.

  Stoner leaned over Tavalera and grasped his shoulder. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Raoul. It’s all right; I promise you.”

  Tavalera felt a wave of tranquility wash over him, like a soft blanket, like sliding into a tub of warm, relaxing water. His heartbeat slowed to normal. His breathing calmed.

  After a few moments, Stoner asked, “Are you all right now?” Genuine concern was etched on his face.

  Tavalera nodded shakily. “Yeah. I think so.” He glanced around at the blinking, beeping panels and the huge gleaming expanse of Earth hanging outside. “Wh . . . where the hell are we, anyway?”

  “We’re in a high orbit around the Earth,” Stoner replied. “I’m afraid this spacecraft control center that you see is something of an illusion. The starship’s interior doesn’t actually look this way.”

  Tavalera looked around himself again. The compartment certainly looked completely real. The recliner he lay on felt solid beneath him.

  “I’m presenting this appearance to you because it’s something you can comprehend; it’s within your experience.”

  “Yeah. . . .”

  “I don’t want to upset you or confuse you. You’re going to have to deal with plenty of new issues, believe me.”

  Tavalera couldn’t think of a reply. His mind was working hard to digest all that Stoner was telling him.

  At last he asked, “Then we’re not in orbit?” His voice sounded weak, almost pleading, in his own ears.

  “Oh, we’re in orbit, all right. That’s really Earth hanging out there.” Stoner’s bearded face contracted into a perplexed frown. “The real question is, when are we?”