by Ben Bova
From her seat next to the TV console, Ilona Lucacs had to bend uncomfortably to watch the screen. But she kept her eyes fastened on it, just as Jo did. It averted the necessity to speak.
Stoner would have laughed, but he knew it would merely add to Jo’s steaming anger. His star brother noted how much the contortions of classic ballet were based on simian gestures. Especially the steps that show the crotch to the audience. If an ape did that the audience would either laugh or feel offended.
The limousine swung up the airport entrance ramp at last, then drove out to the hangar apron where the Vanguard Industries jet was waiting, a nasty dead-black beast with stovepipe scramjet engines and stubby wings that were built for speed, not looks.
Stoner walked his wife to the plane, saying, “I’ll make the funeral arrangements with Rozmenko or whoever’s in charge and phone you when it’s all set.”
“You phone me tonight,” Jo said, with some heat. “Or, better yet, I’ll call you as soon as I get home.”
“Fine.” He smiled at her.
Despite herself, she smiled back. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Making an old woman like me jealous.”
He put his arms around her and kissed her soundly. “Next meeting of the IIA, you can flirt with Cliff Baker all you want.”
Jo made a half-strangled growling sound, then pecked another kiss on his lips and turned to the metal ladder of her plane’s hatch. Instantly a dark Mediterranean steward appeared at the hatch and extended his hand to assist her up the three steps. She turned and gave Stoner a final wave, then ducked through the hatch.
Stoner walked slowly back to the limousine, and stood beside it as the scramjet howled to shrieking life and taxied off to the runway. He waited until he saw it take off into the leaden gray Moscow sky, then got back into the limo and asked the driver to take them to Dr. Lucacs’s hotel.
“You speak very good Russian,” she said. She stayed on the jumpseat where she had been when Jo had shared the rear bench with Stoner.
“So do you.”
“It is taught in our schools. It is mandatory to know the language of our Big Brother.”
Stoner smiled at her, noting that she made no effort at all to move beside him. They rode back to the city, stopping at red lights now and then, facing each other and carrying on an utterly meaningless mundane conversation. But through the banalities, Stoner still sensed a hidden tension in Ilona Lucacs, a motivating force, an intensity that was driving her mercilessly.
When the limousine pulled up in front of the hotel, Dr. Lucacs asked, “Where are you staying?”
Stoner could have gone to the Vanguard office, near Red Square; the staff there would have put him up in one of the company’s luxury apartments. But an inner voice warned him not to be so obvious. He glanced at the hotel’s facade. Stolid featureless concrete and glass, as coldly impersonal as a stack of trays at a cafeteria, the kind of a building that only a bureaucrat could love.
“This looks as good as any,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll stay here.”
Lucacs’s tawny eyes regarded him with a mixture of amusement and youthful pity. “I doubt it, Dr. Stoner. The room clerk told me the hotel was fully booked when I checked in, and I had to show him my reservation form three times before he would allow me to register.”
The chauffeur had opened the limo’s door and was waiting on the curbside. Stoner ducked his lanky frame through and then helped Lucacs out of the car.
“I’ll give it a try anyway,” he said lightly.
The hotel lobby was neat, clean, and designed for efficiency. No chairs or couches for loafers to while away the hours. No newsstand or drug store. Nothing but a polished tile floor and unadorned concrete walls that echoed footsteps off the high ceiling. And the registration desk, a wooden counter that was built so low that even Lucacs had to stoop slightly when the sour-faced female room clerk placed her key upon it.
Stoner smiled at the clerk and asked for a room.
“We are entirely booked,” said the clerk smugly. She was a plump woman of forty or so, with reddish hair that looked slightly bedraggled after a long day of denying requests.
“Oh, you must have something open,” Stoner said.
She started to shake her head, but instead asked, “Do you have a reservation?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then there’s nothing…”
“Nothing?” Stoner interrupted, his voice velvet soft. “Are you certain?”
The woman hesitated. “Well…let me see.” She turned uncertainly toward the computer at her dimpled elbow and stared for a moment at its flickering display.
“A cancellation,” she announced after a few moments of frowning study. “You are a lucky fellow.”
Stoner smiled broadly at her. Dr. Lucacs stared with wondering eyes. With no luggage whatever, Stoner entered the elevator with Ilona Lucacs and suggested they have dinner together. She swiftly agreed.
His room was small. Its single bed was covered with gray-looking sheets and a small pile of neatly folded blankets, no two of them the same color. The furniture was heavy production line stuff, meant for utility and hard wear rather than looks. Computer terminal built into the TV. Bathroom functional, stark white. The only window looked out on an identical building, rows of windows with curtains drawn tight.
It was all clean, smelling of disinfectant and strong detergents. Stoner nodded to himself, satisfied, and sat on the only chair as he took the communicator off his wrist.
Holding it close to his mouth, he instructed the computer built into the bracelet to contact Jo. She would be somewhere near the Arctic Circle by now, on the polar route back to Hawaii.
“Keith? What’s wrong?” Even through the miniaturized speaker the anxiety in her voice came through clearly.
Smiling, “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to let you know that I’m not staying at a Vanguard apartment.”
It took almost a full second for her reply to reach him, relayed off a Vanguard satellite. “Why not?”
“A hunch. I don’t want to be so easily traced.”
“Then what about this call?”
He shrugged, even though she could not see it. “The Vanguard comm system is pretty secure, isn’t it?”
A longer delay than the relay time warranted. “I think so. But if you’re worried you ought to contact the Moscow office’s chief of security.”
“I’m not that worried,” he replied. “In fact, I’m not really worried at all. I’m just…following a hunch.”
“Can you tell me where you’re staying?”
Glancing at the multilingual safety instructions glowing on the TV screen, “Hotel Armand Hammer,” he answered with some surprise.
Jo laughed. It was good to hear. “Must be where they put visiting capitalists.”
“No, this is where Dr. Lucacs is staying.”
“You’re at the same hotel with her?”
“There’s something going on in her head that she’s not telling us about. Maybe she doesn’t know it herself, but there’s more involved here than she’s told us.”
“I’ll bet there is!”
Realizing her temper was rising, Stoner soothed, “Jo, she’s young enough to be my granddaughter.”
“And old enough to be a mother.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score,” he said.
“Then why am I worried?”
Paulino Alvarado puffed nervously on his last cigarette. His clothes were a mess, he knew. With the army and police both looking for him, he had no other choice but to go to the men in the city who had first talked him into setting up the Moondust factory in his village. They had hidden him in seamy hotels and filthy shacks, moving him almost daily, giving him cigarettes and food in exchange for odd jobs.
And Moondust. Paulino had to have Moondust; the tiny gray pills were the difference between being alive and dying by inches. They let him have just enough to keep him going.
Each time he slept Paulino dr
eamed of the soldiers. He saw them again and again and he wept with the shame of his stupidity and cowardice.
Beyond his shame, beyond the hatred for the soldiers who had slaughtered his father and god knew who else, there was the fear. At the very bottom of Paulino Alvarado’s soul was the fundamental fear of dying, the burning terror that drove a man to do anything, anything in order to survive, in order to get the next one of those gray pills.
Now he sat in a shabby windowless room, filthy, unshaved, itching from the vermin that infested his clothes, knowing that he looked like a miserable worn-out peon rather than a young man with an education and a future. There was nothing in the room except the chair he sat on, some packing cartons stacked against the wall, and two doors. One from the alley, where he had come from, and the other leading to—where? Paulino wondered.
The cigarette singed his fingers and he dropped it to the bare wooden floor, scarred by countless other butts.
Waiting. The bare fluorescent lamp up on the ceiling flickered annoyingly. Paulino shut his eyes and immediately his head drooped forward. But he saw the soldiers burning, raping, killing. He snapped awake.
The other door opened and a man stood framed in the light from the room beyond. He filled the doorway: massive body, thick arms, heavy shoulders that seemed to come straight out from his ears.
“Come in here, chico,” he said in a voice as heavy and rough as his looks.
Paulino stood shakily and brushed at the filth on his shirt and slacks as he stepped uncertainly to the doorway. The roughneck stood aside so that he could enter the office.
The man behind the desk wore an elegant patterned jacket over a neatly starched pale green shirt. His mustache was thin and carefully trimmed. There was a small diamond in his left earlobe and several flashing rings on his lean, manicured fingers. On his desk, next to the telephone, was a small plastic box filled with tiny gray pills, like dirty aspirin tablets.
“It looks like you’ve had a rough time of it,” he said, in a deep baritone. “Sit down. Jorge, give him a drink.”
Paulino sputtered with the tequila, but it felt warm and strengthening inside him. The man behind the desk watched with unreadable eyes. Paulino could not help staring at the box of Moondust.
“I found out how your village was betrayed,” the man said.
Paulino stiffened with sudden anger. “Someone informed on us,” he growled.
The man behind the desk shook his head slightly. “No. It was a Peace Enforcers’ satellite. It detected the unusual heat coming from your little factory. I know how they work. They analyzed the smoke coming from your furnace and then informed the army in Lima.”
Paulino held the emptied glass in his grimy hand. It felt heavy, solid, somehow reassuring.
“The Frenchman told me that the factory was not illegal.”
“He strained the truth,” said the man behind the desk, smiling so slightly that he actually looked pained.
The Frenchman had also said that Moondust was not addictive, Paulino remembered.
“We can’t keep you here forever, hiding from the police. We have to find someplace for you to go, something for you to do.”
Paulino shifted uneasily in his chair. He felt the presence of the roughneck standing behind him like the heat from an open oven. And the pills, almost in reach.
“We must find a place for you that is safe,” the elegant man continued. “Someplace where you can make a living. I understand you have a degree in computer maintenance.”
“Yes, but…”
“We will send you to the Moon, then. As a maintenance engineer. You can help us to establish our operations there. It could be very profitable for you.”
“The…Moon?”
“Yes. The Vanguard Industries base there needs maintenance engineers. And there are several thousand potential customers there for our wares.” He smiled again. “After all, shouldn’t those who live on the Moon be able to have some Moondust?”
“The Moon,” Paulino repeated, his voice empty.
The man behind the desk nodded, and the roughneck touched Paulino’s shoulder. He got up and started for the door. But halfway there Paulino turned and begged, “Please. Just one?”
The man behind the desk pretended surprise. “Oh? The Moondust? I forgot—these are for you.” He held out the box to Paulino’s eager reaching trembling fingers. “To keep you company on your journey.”
Paulino grasped the little box in both hands, clutched it to his chest, and shuffled almost blindly back to the windowless room from which he had come. The roughneck shut the door behind him.
“He can be very useful to us up there,” said the man behind the desk, as if justifying his decision.
The roughneck gave a snort. “If he lives.”
“Even if he does not, we still get the headhunters’ fee for recruiting him.”
“He’ll never make it on the Moon,” the roughneck predicted. “Too soft. He’s hooked on the pills.”
The elegant man shrugged. “Then we will recruit someone else. And make a headhunter’s bounty off him, too.”
LONDON
ENZO Massalino stared at the display screen for a long, long time. Then he rubbed at his eyes and stared at it again. His guts were churning with a frantic turmoil of conflicting emotions: the thrill of discovery, the burning tendrils of horror, the guilty pleasure of knowing that his name will be on the first paper published about this, the growing terror that this virus would kill millions before they could find a way to stop it.
If they could find a way to stop it, he corrected himself. And his fear began to overwhelm every other thought.
He was a slight, spare man who had spent most of his life in research laboratories, always doing a competent job, never distinguishing himself, one of the faceless nameless army of researchers who stood guard over the public health.
Now the chance for immortality stared him in the face. And the chance of sudden, excruciatingly painful death. The evidence was conclusive. Fourteen cases reported from around the world: Bangkok, Cairo, Istanbul, and the latest one from Naples.
The virus attacked the victim’s digestive tract, devoured the linings of the stomach and intestines so that the victim’s own digestive juices began to eat away its internal organs. Death was quick and incredibly painful. The virus’s incubation time was apparently only a matter of hours.
Apparently it was water-borne. Thank god for that much, he said to himself. It’s not an aerial virus. You can’t catch it from sneezing or coughing.
Or can you? Plenty of water droplets in a sneeze.
He ran a hand through his thinning hair. My god, my god. We don’t know enough about this virus to even get started against it. The damned bug could wipe out the whole human race before we figure out what to do about it!
He thought about his native city of Rome, with its millions upon millions living cheek by jowl over hundreds of square miles. And the jet airliners that landed and took off from Rome’s three airports every thirty seconds, carrying microbes and viruses to and from every comer of the world. And the rocketplanes that spread their wings even farther and faster.
We’re doomed, he said to himself. The human race is doomed.
CHAPTER 12
“WHEN I was an astrophysicist, long, long ago,” Stoner was saying to Ilona Lucacs, “Hungarians told strange stories about themselves.”
“Really?”
They were sitting at a candlelit table for two in the corner of a quiet restaurant not far from their hotel. It had been recommended on the list that the hotel’s computer provided. When they had entered, the maitre d’ had looked doubtfully at Stoner’s jeans and denim jacket. Stoner had smiled and apologized softly for not being in proper dinner attire. With a perplexed frown, as if he were doing something against his inner convictions, the maitre d’ muttered, “Netu problema,” and seated them in the corner farthest from the door.
“It was as if the Hungarians prided themselves on being sneakier than other peopl
e,” Stoner said.
“Sneakier?” Ilona’s heart-shaped face frowned slightly. “I am not sure I understand…”
She still wore the same tweed skirt and jacket as earlier in the day, although she had changed to a frillier, more feminine blouse. They were speaking in English. Stoner thought it best not to show that he could pick up Hungarian, or any other language, almost instantly.
“Sneakier,” he repeated. “For example, a Hungarian student I went to class with told me, ‘A Hungarian can go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you.’”
Comprehension lit her eyes. “Ah, yes! And the Hungarian recipe for an omelet: ‘First, steal some eggs.’”
Stoner laughed.
“The best one,” Ilona said, laughing with him, “is this: ‘If you meet a Hungarian in the street, kick him. He will know why.’”
Their waiter was a Japanese robot that was programmed to keep their wine glasses topped off. It rolled smoothly to their table, gripped the bottle of Egri Bikaver from their table, and neatly poured the Hungarian red wine into their balloon glasses.
“Very good wine,” Stoner commented.
“The blood of the bull,” said Ilona Lucacs. “That is what this wine is called.”
Stoner smiled at her and asked casually, “If I met you on the street and kicked you, would you know why?”
Her lioness’s eyes instantly became guarded. She replied, “Yes. Of course. I could say the same for you, could I not?”
“I’m not Hungarian.”
“But you carry your secrets within you, just as we all do.”
Leaning back in his chair, Stoner heard his star brother whisper, The secret within us is much different from the secrets of other human beings.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. The restaurant was quiet, half empty. No music, neither live nor piped in through loudspeakers. The only sounds were the clinks of dinnerware and an occasional whisper of conversation. The robot waiters stood mutely at their stations, and when they moved it was practically without any noise at all.