Voyagers III - Star Brothers

by Ben Bova

  Jo knew that Hsen’s term, “expansion program,” was a euphemism for the planned invasion of Venezuela.

  Slowly she said, “Brazil will still be increasing its exports of coffee, metals, petrochemicals. Pacific Commerce will still carry those cargoes in its ships. The export program will shift emphasis, it will be aimed at different markets, that’s all.”

  A splash of bright glareless light from one of the street lamps at the entrance ramp to the automated highway briefly illuminated Hsen’s face. In that flash of a moment Jo saw undisguised fury in the oriental’s eyes. Then the shadows concealed him once more.

  “They have cancelled the negotiations for new loans,” Kruppmann said, his voice heavy and dismal.

  “They’ll need new loans soon enough, and they’ll come to you for them,” Jo soothed. To herself she added, But you won’t have those greedy generals to fleece; you’ll have to deal with people who know something about finance.

  “Ja, but when?”

  “And when will they need shipping? I have six container ships sitting in Brazilian ports now, idle. Do you realize how much that costs? Every day?”

  With a shrug of her bare shoulders, Jo replied, “But these are normal business problems. You didn’t hop into my limo just to tell me your everyday troubles.”

  Another long silence, while the light of the highway lamps flickered among the shadows in the back of the limousine like a stroboscope. Jo saw flashes of the two men’s faces: grim, angry, worried. But not uncertain, she decided. They knew exactly what they wanted.

  “This business of Brazil,” Kruppmann repeated. “All of a sudden de Sagres has become a strong man. His people look up to him. Other leaders in Latin America are seeking his advice, his help.”

  “Like Nkona in Nigeria,” said Hsen. “And the upstart Varahamihara in Bangladesh.”

  “One minute they are nobodies, and the next they are being called ‘Great Souls’ and having millions kneel at their feet,” Kruppmann grumbled.

  “De Sagres was never a nobody,” Jo countered.

  “He was a malleable politician until a few months ago. Now he is becoming the leader of the continent.”

  Hsen added, “Nkona came from nowhere and somehow stabilized all of sub-Saharan Africa. Varahamihara was an obscure lama.”

  “Who averted nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” Jo pointed out.

  “And now is being compared to Gandhi.”

  “His political influence is as great as Gandhi’s,” Kruppmann said. “Greater, even. Both the Hindus and the Moslems revere him. Even the Sikhs follow him!”

  “It was Nkona who started the movement to restructure southern hemisphere debt,” said Hsen, almost accusingly. “And the Bangladesh lama is leading the struggle for family planning throughout Asia!”

  Jo remained silent, but her heart was racing so hard she feared they could hear it in the darkness of the limousine. Did they know that each of these men had been visited by Keith Stoner? Her husband.

  Hunching forward, burly arms on heavy thighs, Kruppmann said, “These events are not random. They follow a pattern. They represent nothing less than a deliberate move toward realignment of the world’s financial structure.”

  “A realignment of the international power base,” said Hsen.

  Realignment. What a bloodless word, thought Jo. She recalled what the world had been like fifteen years earlier, when the great multinational corporations were running roughshod over the world.

  Keith had made her see what was happening. And why it had to change. Forests ripped down in Brazil; farmers and even scientists who dared to protest killed by mercenary soldiers. War tearing central Africa apart; whole tribes annihilated, genocide so routine that it was hardly newsworthy. Terrorists striking blindly in a blood lust that seemed endless. Greenhouse effect turning farmlands into deserts, raising sea levels everywhere. Population growing, swelling, bursting beyond the capability of the world to sustain so many human beings. Six billion people. Eight. Ten. Most of them starving, diseased, born in miserable poverty and dying in miserable poverty; surviving only long enough to make still more babies, half a million more each day.

  Keith Stoner struggled to change that world. With Jo beside him, he quietly, fiercely, unceasingly worked to save the human race from self-destruction. With the drive of an implacable force of nature, with an intensity and single-minded strength that went far beyond ordinary human abilities, Stoner worked invisibly, beyond the sight of the world’s intelligence services and news media, to improve the human condition. Jo helped him, shielded him, put the enormous resources of the world’s largest corporation at his disposal.

  Thanks to Keith Stoner, and his wife, central Africa was now an interdependent economic zone that sold its natural resources on the world market and invested in raising the standard of living for its people. Terrorism dwindled as true wealth began trickling into the hands of the poorest of the Earth. Fusion energy desalted seawater and pumped it along thousands of kilometers of irrigation channels. Blind exploitation of the planet’s resources was slowing, a little more each year, as a new economic balance was painfully attained.

  Hardly anyone knew that Stoner was the man behind this monumental change. But have Hsen and Kruppmann found out? Jo wondered. Have they learned the role I’ve been playing in all this?

  If they find out, Jo told herself, they will try to stop Keith. And the only way to stop him will be to kill him. That was why her heart pounded beneath the cool surface she presented to the two angry men riding in her limousine.

  With a small nod, Jo said to them, “Your computer forecasts must be telling you the same things mine do. The old days of East-West competition are gone. Today it’s the North against the South. The industrialized nations against the nations that hold most of the world’s natural resources.”

  “The rich against the poor, as always,” Kruppmann agreed.

  “But the poor are making rapid strides,” Hsen pointed out.

  “Is that so bad?” Jo asked lightly. “The more money they have, the more they can spend on what we have to sell.”

  “They are moving to create a world government,” Kruppmann insisted. “First the Peace Enforcers, then this verdammt International Investment Agency…”

  “Which you helped to create,” Hsen accused.

  Jo arched an eyebrow at them. “The IIA has forestalled god knows how much terrorism by channelling investment money to the nations that need it.”

  “Extorting blackmail from every major corporation, you mean!” Kruppmann groused. “Blood money!”

  “Do you want to go back to the way it was ten or twelve years ago? Would you like to have your factories blown up by terrorists, or be kidnapped and tortured to death?”

  “We are not here to argue about the International Investment Agency,” Hsen said. “Although it troubles me that you so often vote against us at board meetings, Ms. Camerata.”

  Masking her fear with a cold smile, Jo replied, “I don’t want the IIA board split into two intransigent camps. If every vote comes down to ‘us against them,’ the Third World and the environmentalist zealots will defeat the corporations every time. A bipolarized board would be very bad for us.”

  Kruppmann shook his head, making his beefy cheeks waddle. “You are proud of kowtowing to the Greens? Do you know how much the ridiculous ecological constraints your IIA insists upon are costing us?”

  “Vanguard complies with those environmental constraints, just like everyone else,” Jo replied.

  “For how long?” asked Hsen, as softly as a cobra gliding toward its prey.

  Jo stared at his shadowed face, its expression hidden in the darkness as the limo sped silently along the highway. So that’s what this is all about, she realized. He wants to take over Vanguard.

  “For as long as I’m president of Vanguard,” she said mildly.

  “Which means,” Hsen replied, “for as long as you control your board of directors. Some of them are not as pleased with your II
A as you seem to be.”

  Kruppmann nodded. “This is true. Many of the directors dislike your infatuation with those environmentalists and Third World beggars.”

  “Do you want to put the matter on the agenda of our next board meeting, Wilhelm?” Jo asked, the sweetness of cyanide in her voice.

  Kruppmann glanced at Hsen, then evaded with, “But the IIA is just the tip of the iceberg. These are merely preliminary steps. They mean to form a world government and to tax us into the poorhouse. I know this!”

  “Who means to start a world government?” asked Jo.

  “They do. The Third World. The Greens. The Arabs and Africans and Latin Americans. I am certain of it.”

  “But who in the Third World?” Jo insisted. “Which nations? I haven’t heard anything at all…”

  “It is not a nation that is fomenting this idea,” said Hsen. “It is some small group of special people. Some elite organization, some hidden force that works through the Third World nations and organizations such as your International Investment Agency. We can see them at work in Brazil, and India, and elsewhere. These so-called ‘Great Souls’ are nothing more than the front men for the real organization working against us.”

  “Aren’t you confusing a few random events with some international scheme?” Jo countered. “There’s no movement to create a world government. That’s pure paranoia.”

  “There is such a scheme afoot!” Kruppmann slammed a heavy fist on the padded armrest. “And it is extremely dangerous for us.”

  “It must be stopped.”

  As calmly as she could, Jo answered, “But our companies are still profitable. None of this has harmed us very much.”

  “We have lost billions!” Kruppmann snapped.

  “And made billions elsewhere,” Jo pointed out.

  “Pah! You’ll think it’s a necklace when they come to slip the noose around your throat.”

  “Perhaps you don’t understand the long-range implications,” Hsen protested. “A world government would be dominated by the overpopulated nations of the southern hemisphere—including, I must add, several Asian nations above the equator, such as India and the Philippines.”

  “And China,” Jo snapped.

  “Their first order of business will be to squeeze taxes out of us until we go bankrupt,” Kruppmann grumbled. “And then they will take over all our factories and other facilities. They want to control everything, the entire world! They are dangerous!”

  “And your IIA is helping them,” insisted Hsen. “Perhaps you do not realize it, but the International Investment Agency is part of our problem. You have supported the IIA blindly, and this must stop.”

  Jo fought to keep her face from showing her thoughts. You little yellow bastard, you don’t like what the IIA is doing, so you’re threatening to push me out of Vanguard if I don’t play the game your way. She knew that Hsen had his own little clique on her board of directors, including Kruppmann. If I don’t do what they want, he’s going to try to muscle me out. Very neat.

  Almost, she relaxed. Handling her board of directors was not frightening to her. They had even elected her chairman, unanimously, two years earlier.

  “Still,” she said softly, “I think the IIA has been a net gain for us. We’re in no real trouble.”

  “We will be if this keeps on!” Kruppmann grumbled.

  “Then what do you propose to do about it?”

  Hsen now leaned forward too. “First, we must find out who our enemies are and how they are organized.”

  Jo nodded.

  “Then we must eliminate them,” said Kruppmann, with implacable finality.

  Making her lips smile in the shadows, Jo asked, “Have you taken any steps along those lines?”

  “Yes, we have. We want you to help us, though. We need the support that Vanguard Industries can give us.”

  Hsen added, “And we need you to work for us at the IIA instead of against us.”

  “I won’t do a thing unless you bring me proof that this—this cabal actually exists.”

  “The proof we will bring you.”

  “We must work together on this,” Hsen insisted. “You are either with us or against us.”

  Very carefully, Jo said, “I don’t want a world bureaucracy taxing us to death any more than you do.”

  As she listened to their plans, Jo knew that these men meant to seek out her husband and kill him. They think they can control me by threatening to take over Vanguard and throwing me out. But they mean to kill Keith, once they find out who he is and what he’s been doing.

  And when they find out that I’ve been helping him, they’ll want to kill me too.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT was lunchtime in Sydney. Cliff Baker sat half sprawled in the imitation wicker chair at a corner table in his favorite restaurant, the oh-so-posh and totally phony Bombay Room atop the tallest skyscraper in Australia. Fake Hindus with bogus turbans waited on the tables with feigned humility and fraudulent politeness. Wog-waiters, Baker called them: phony as a virgin in a cathouse. Bowing and scraping and speaking in whispers. Not a robot in sight. But you paid for all the servility; the prices were even higher than the room’s altitude.

  From his corner table Baker could see the magnificent harbor with its graceful old bridge and the breathtaking opera house. But his attention was riveted, instead, on his luncheon companion.

  She was a Magyar beauty, with honey-colored hair, high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face with slightly asian eyes the color of a lioness’s. Flawless skin. Delightful bosom straining the buttons of her mannishly tailored blouse.

  Baker was halfway drunk, not an unusual condition for him in the early afternoon. He had started their luncheon with three whiskeys, then consumed most of the wine that the servile, bowing wog-waiters had poured for them. Now the restaurant was nearly empty and the turbaned crew stood clustered near the kitchen door, whispering among themselves as they waited for the last luncheon customers to leave. The dishes had been cleared from their table by still other dark-skinned fakes in turbans, but Baker had called for a bottle of cognac and two snifters. His glass was now empty. Temporarily.

  He had been a ruggedly handsome man fifteen years ago, with golden blond hair and a lean muscular body. Now his face sagged and there were pouches beneath his blue eyes. He was going to bloat, and even his hair looked a thinning, unhealthy graying blond.

  “So you want to know about Stoner, do you. That’s what this is all about?”

  The woman nodded, holding her snifter in both hands, where it caught a glint of afternoon sunlight.

  “Dr. Ilona Lucacs,” muttered Baker. “Doctor of what?”

  “Neurophysiology,” she said, in a voice that was almost sultry. “At the University of Budapest.”

  “And what’s your interest in Stoner?”

  Dr. Lucacs was clearly uncomfortable, but she forced a smile. Luscious lips, thought Baker.

  “My interest is purely scientific,” she said, with the trace of an exotic accent. “My research is in the area of cryonics, freezing people at the point of death so that they can be revived later, when medical science has learned how to cure the ailment that is killing them.”

  “Ahhh,” said Baker, reaching for the cognac bottle. “So Stoner’s still the only one to make it out of the deep freeze, eh?”

  “So far as I have been able to determine, no other human being has ever been revived successfully from cryonic suspension.”

  Baker splashed five centimeters of golden brown liquid into his snifter and downed half of it in one gulp. “Then An Linh’s mother is still on ice,” he muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?” Dr. Lucacs leaned forward slightly, a motion that roused Baker’s heart rate.

  “An old friend of mine,” explained Baker. “Her mother was dying of cancer so she had the old lady frozen—god, must be twenty-five years or more.”

  “Would this be Ms. An Linh Laguerre?”

  “You’ve met her?”

  “I interviewed
her a few weeks ago, in Paris.”

  “How is she?”

  “Very successful. She is a vice president of Global Communications.”

  “So I heard. Haven’t seen her in more than ten years. She was a close friend of mine, back then. A very close friend.”

  Dr. Lucacs caught his meaning. “She is married now, and has two children. She appears to be quite happy with her life.”

  Baker grunted. “Global’s a subsidiary of Vanguard Industries, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “It is. She’s working for Vanguard, same as me.”

  “You did know Dr. Stoner fifteen years ago…”

  But Baker was muttering, “We all work for Vanguard, dearie. You, me, An Linh, everybody. They own us all.”

  Ignoring his implications, Dr. Lucacs tried to get the conversation back on subject. “How well did you know Dr. Stoner?”

  “Not well. But too well, if you get my meaning.”

  “I’m sorry?” She shook her head.

  Baker gulped the rest of the cognac in his glass, then leaned his head back as if inspecting the high ceiling with its slowly-turning fans.

  “I knew him well enough to damned near get killed,” he said, bitter anger in his voice. “I knew him well enough to get kidnapped and tortured. Too damned well.”

  She said nothing, but glanced at the purse in her lap where a miniaturized tape recorder was hidden.

  “You don’t know about Stoner, not really.” Baker hunched forward in his chair, leaning both arms heavily on the table and bringing his face close enough to hers so that she could smell the liquor on his breath.

  “He’s not human. He can see right through you and make you do things you don’t want to do. I saw him make a bloke go blind, just while we were sitting at the dinner table. Made his eyes bleed, for chrissakes! Drove him dotty.” His words were blurring together now, coming out in a half-drunken rush, frenzied, urgent. “He turned the owner of Vanguard Industries into a basket case just by saying a few words to him. He never sleeps! He spent months with An Linh in Africa and never touched her—for sex, I mean. I think he can walk through walls if he wants to. He’s not human, not human at all!”