by Ben Bova
“Come on now, what do we know for certain?” the man behind the desk coaxed.
His assistant, the other male, started off: “It’s transmitted through water. It does not appear to be an airborne virus, but that’s not certain.”
“Definitely transmitted by water, though. That much is certain,” said one of the women.
“Sneezes?” asked the man behind the desk. “Plenty of water droplets in a sneeze.”
“Apparently, yes,” said the other woman.
“Christ, it must be contagious as all hell then.”
“Worse.”
“It attacks women preferentially,” said the first woman. Grimly.
“Is that for sure?”
“Ninety percent of the cases are female. Sixty-three percent of them were pregnant. The damned bug must react to estrogen or one of the other female hormones.”
“Christ on a crutch!”
The man behind the desk pecked at his tape recorder. “Action item: check estrogen levels in all male victims.” To the three people in the room he added, “If they have levels of female hormones above the male norm, we’ll have learned something.”
“Something,” said the first woman. “But what good will it do us?”
The man behind the desk shrugged. “You’re sure about how it works?”
“Destroys the lining of the stomach—”
“The whole digestive tract, right down to the asshole.”
“Do you have to be crude?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s the stomach lining that’s important. The virus dissolves it, and the digestive acids get into the abdominal cavity and eat away the internal organs.”
“Excruciating pain.”
“Victim usually dies within hours.”
“Which doesn’t leave us with much to study.”
“Incubation time?” asked the man behind the desk. “How long between the time the victim takes in the virus and it starts dissolving the stomach lining?”
“Unknown.”
“Can’t be long, not at the rate the plague is spreading.”
The colored maps showed a garish red where the epidemic existed. Southeast Asia and most of India were in red. Tendrils of red extended northward into China and west through Iran. Islands of red splotched major cities across half the world: Istanbul, Manila, Naples, Frankfurt, Rio, New Orleans, Miami, New York.
“The virus likes a warm climate,” said the man behind the desk.
“Yeah, but it’s spreading into the temperate zones,” the other male replied.
“Damn.”
“Vectors?”
“Commercial air traffic,” said the younger woman.
“Are you sure?”
She tapped at the remote control unit in her hand and one of the display screens showed a world map with a speeded-up presentation of where the disease had first been reported and how it had spread. The tendrils of red followed world air routes.
“Wonderful,” groaned the man behind the desk. “If we want to stop the spread of the plague we’ve got to shut down all the goddamned commercial air carriers.”
“Fat chance!”
“The virus rides the airlines. Damn! That makes it tough.”
“Are we certain it’s a virus?” The others turned toward the gray-haired woman. “I mean, we haven’t isolated it, whatever it is. We’re just assuming it’s a virus.”
“You think it might be a microbe? A bacterium? That would be good news.”
“Too good to be true. Whatever it is filters right through everything we’ve used to find it.”
“Chemical analyses?”
“Inconclusive. I think whatever the bug is, it dissolves itself when the stomach acids come pouring out.”
“That doesn’t make sense. If it kamikazes inside its victim, then how the hell does it spread to other victims?”
“It’s transmitted before it attacks the mucous layer, maybe?”
They all fell silent until the man behind the desk said grimly, “Seems to me what we don’t know about this bug outweighs what we do know by about a hundred to one.”
“But is it really a bug?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, maybe it’s a chemical agent of some kind.”
“A pollutant?”
“Or a biological warfare agent that’s gotten out of hand.”
“Jesus H. You-Know-Who!”
CHAPTER 20
FEODOR Rozmenko looked clearly unhappy. He had ushered Stoner and Jo into the office that had been Markov’s, telling them that it was larger and more comfortable than his own cubbyhole.
Jo had insisted that Keith put on a real suit for this meeting. He had acquiesced, but wore a golden turtleneck shirt beneath the sky-blue jacket she had picked from the stocked wardrobe in the Vanguard apartment. Jo was in a tan military-style hip-length jacket, with epaulets and leather buttons, cinched by a wide leather belt. The skirt came almost to her knee, a length that was demure enough for a businesswoman while still showing her long legs to good effect.
Two men were already in Markov’s old office, waiting. They shot to their feet as Rozmenko brought the Stoners in and introduced them. The leaner of the pair was a lawyer; the other an official from the Soviet space agency.
Curiouser and curiouser, thought Stoner as he held a chair for his wife and then sat in the one next to hers. Rozmenko took the chair that had been placed beside Markov’s desk. The desk itself remained unoccupied, its worn old leather chair empty.
Jo remembered this office and how that chair would creak when Kirill rocked in it. Kir always made the same joke: “I hope that creaking is the chair, and not me.”
Rozmenko coughed politely, his way of bringing the meeting to order. “Professor Markov left part of his last will and testament on videotape. Our legal counsel,” he nodded toward the gaunt, dark-suited lawyer, “has examined the tape and assures us that it is a valid and legal will.”
The lawyer nodded gravely.
“With your permission, Dr. and Mrs. Stoner, I will now play the tape.”
Stoner could feel Jo’s tension. And his own. I’m just coming to terms with the idea that Kir is dead, and now I’m going to see him alive, hear him speaking. His star brother smiled within him: Life and death are not so simple, after all, are they?
The TV was built into the panelled wall above the narrow table that held Kirill’s samovar. Rozmenko touched two buttons on the desktop keyboard with his stubby finger, and the screen flickered with colors.
Markov’s face appeared, his cheeks hollow and dark, his straggly little beard snow white, his soulful eyes looking somewhere off camera.
“It is working?” he asked in Russian. “Good. Good.”
Markov looked straight into the camera, clasped his hands on his desk and hunched forward slightly. With a smile he said in English:
“My darling Jo, beautiful lady who fills my dreams. And you too, Keith, my old and dear friend. It must seem strange to be watching this tape, since I will have to be dead before you can see it. It seems strange to me! Like speaking from the grave.”
Stoner glanced at Jo. She was rigidly controlling herself, her face showing no emotion whatever. But he could sense the feelings that were simmering beneath her outer show of composure.
“I have written out my last will and testament, so the lawyers can handle it in their usual way. But there is one request—request, not bequest, kindly notice—that concerns both of you.” Markov smiled like a little boy who knew he was asking for more than he deserved.
“I have decided to have my body sent out to the stars, just the way our alien visitor did.”
Stoner felt utterly surprised. Kir refused to be frozen when it could have helped him. But he had already made up his mind to send his dead body out to the stars.
His star brother said, The man was ready for death; he had given up his will to live.
“I know it’s not much of a body,” Markov was saying. “I haven’t taken particula
rly good care of it, all these years. But I want to give it as a gift to some other race of intelligent creatures. I want to tell them that they are not alone, and that the universe is not a hostile arena of aggressive species.
“Jo, Keith, obviously I need your help to do this. The Soviet space agency can build a vehicle and put it on a rocket that will fling me clear of the solar system. But it seems to me that the alien starship had some form of guidance system that led it to worlds where life might exist. Can you duplicate that guidance system for my sarcophagus? I do not want to be set blindly adrift—I would like to know that I am sailing in a direction that might do some good, even if it is thousands of years from now.
“Will you do this for me? It is the last request I will ever make of you. I love you both. Be happy together. Good-bye from your devoted friend.”
The screen went blank.
Before Stoner could take a breath, the space agency official leaned forward in his chair and asked, “Does such a guidance system actually exist?”
Stoner studied the man’s face. There was awestruck curiosity there. And a remorseless drive to learn the secrets of the stars. It reminded Stoner of the old days, back when they had first detected the approaching alien starship, how the Russians and Americans—and all the others—had played their power games back and forth. It reminded him of how he himself had been back then, inhumanly relentless, driven to make contact with the alien visitor no matter what the cost.
“The guidance system was destroyed fifteen years ago,” Stoner answered, “by a man who was terrified at the thought of meeting alien intelligences.”
“My first husband,” Jo confirmed. “He went insane.”
The Russians looked back and forth among themselves.
“Dr. Stoner,” asked the space agency official, “are you certain…?”
Keith smiled, mainly because the man assumed that he should be asking his questions of another man. He doesn’t realize that Jo’s the one with the clout. Or, even if he does know it consciously, he automatically downgrades her and speaks to me.
Aloud, Stoner said, “Please don’t worry about it. Vanguard Industries will duplicate the guidance system for you. It’s the least we can do for our dear friend Professor Markov.”
Jo put on a sweet smile also, adding, “And we will sell it to you at cost.”
Operating a maintenance tractor is simple, Paulino Alvarado kept repeating to himself. His boss had given him a quick orientation ride and then expected him to be able to handle the huge machine by himself.
To a considerable degree the boss had been right. Sitting high up in the tractor’s cab, surrounded by display screens and light-keyed controls, Paulino felt as if he were driving a hypersonic rocketplane rather than a massive tractor lumbering along the Mare Imbrium.
The so-called Sea of Clouds was a rolling plain of dust-covered rock, without a drop of water or a molecule of air, nothing but barren bleak rock stretching to a horizon that seemed dangerously, dizzyingly close. The undulating plain was pockmarked by millions of craters, some of them so big that they could swallow up the tractor and a dozen more, most as small as the poke of a fingertip. Beyond the knife-sharp line of the horizon hung the stars and the blackness of eternity.
It scared Paulino to be out here. Especially alone. The cabin was shielded and he was bundled into a cumbersome pressure suit, but still he felt the hard radiation streaming in from space, felt utterly naked and exposed to the meteoroids that could hit with the power of a hypervelocity bullet.
Unconsciously he pressed a gloved hand against the thigh pocket that held his diminishing supply of Moondust pills. What would my boss do if he knew what I’m carrying? Paulino was afraid of the little man’s wrath. Better to try the pills on some of the other workers and keep the rat-faced boss out of it.
Out on the endless plain other tractors were placidly inching along, unmanned, automated. They scooped in the top layer of dust from the rocky ground at their front ends and deposited little squares of solar cells from their rear ends, turning the native lunar dust into glittering patches of energy farms that transformed sunlight into the electricity that powered the base at Archimedes. To Paulino they looked like enormous mechanical cows quietly grazing across the dusty plain.
His job was to repair malfunctions on the automated tractors. He received a list of malfunctioning machines each morning, rode out to each one guided by its individual radio beacon, and did not start back for home until he had completed repairs on the entire list.
Vanguard Industries’ official work regulations stated that no one was required to remain on the surface, out in the open, for more than four hours at a time. Radiation badges were to be turned in to the health and safety department at the end of each four-hour stint. Paulino’s boss, however, made it abundantly clear that “you stay out ’til you’ve finished the whole fuckin’ list.” And the radiation badges were turned in to him, not the safety people, at the end of the long day.
It had been a very long day. Repair jobs looked easy in the garage: just check the tractor’s diagnostic display, take out the malfunctioning module and put in a fresh one. But doing such work from inside a pressure suit, with thick gloves and the limited vision that even the cleanest bubble helmet yields—that was another matter. And then there was the dust. It clung to everything with electrostatic tenacity. Paulino spent as much time wiping dust from his visor and gloves as he did actually making repairs.
Now he was heading out for the farthest tractor, which had decided to stop dead for a few hours earlier. The job was not on his morning’s list; the boss had radioed the extra task to him.
“You’re practically there already, just a half hour away. No sense comin’ in and then drivin’ all that distance tomorrow.”
Paulino was too new to the job to realize that he could have argued back enough to get the boss to throw in a small bonus for the extra assignment. He sighed and, rather than risking the wrath of the little rat-faced man, pecked out the dead tractor’s location coordinates on his navigational keyboard and turned his own machine in its direction.
He never found it. His tractor lumbered along, up and down the gently rolling plain, turning slowly to avoid troublesome craters, heading farther and farther away from home base. Even the highest radio mast atop the ringwall mountains of Archimedes receded below his horizon, and his only link with the base was by satellite relay.
Paulino tuned in to a powerful radio station broadcasting Andean jazz from somewhere in Latin America, leaned back in his seat and waited for the dead tractor to come into view. He could feel his own machine jouncing and wobbling as it trundled along, but even if the radio had been off he could not have heard any squeaks or mechanical groans in the soundless vacuum of the Moon.
Very carefully he took out the box of pills and shook one into his gloved hand. There was a capsule dispenser built into his helmet, originally designed so that workers could take energy tablets or even medicines while still inside their pressure suits. Paulino giggled to himself as he tongued up the Moondust pill and then, with a turn of his head, sucked on the water nipple.
All the comforts of home, he told himself as the Moondust spread its warming confidence through his body.
The first sign of trouble came when the navigational display showed that he was not heading in the correct direction to reach the malfunctioning tractor. Paulino took no alarm, he merely corrected his machine’s heading. But within five minutes the nav display started blinking and beeping again. More annoyed than frightened, Paulino again reset the coordinates. Then the status board suddenly showed a glaring red warning light. Paulino’s heart clutched within his chest. He touched the screen and its pictograph showed that something was wrong with the left rear wheel.
Paulino stopped the tractor and hopped down to the surface, falling with dreamlike slowness in the light lunar gravity. Clouds of dust stirred when his boots hit the ground. He nearly toppled over, but steadied himself with a hand on the tractor’s massive flank
.
The wheel was coated heavily with dust. The electrostatic cleaner was apparently not working and the dust was starting to jam the axle bearing so that the wheel could not turn at the same speed as the others. Paulino realized that this was why he was drifting off course; the tractor was pulling to the left instead of going straight ahead.
It was not something he could repair. He climbed back into the cab, radioed Archimedes, and told them his situation.
“Come back in,” his boss’s voice replied, filled with disgust. “That tractor you’re in’s worth a million and a quarter. Get it back here in one piece.”
Paulino turned around and headed for home, wondering if the wheel would hold up long enough to get there, with all the constant course corrections he would have to make to compensate for its drift.
“You were pretty damned generous with Vanguard Industries’ proprietary information,” Jo huffed.
Sitting beside her in the narrow cabin of the scramjet, Stoner smiled placatingly. “Vanguard would have to share the information sooner or later; it’s part of the agreement the corporation made with the Russians twenty years ago, when you worked together to rescue the starship. And me.”
The plane was speeding back to Hawaii, bearing Ilona Lucacs and Zoltan Janos as well as Jo and Stoner. The two scientists had docilely allowed themselves to be bundled aboard. Stoner knew they could not return to Hungary without being swallowed alive by the government’s security police, who would want to know exactly what had happened to President Novotny. Their only refuge was with Stoner, who assured them that he would straighten everything out—and even cooperate with them in their research, eventually.
Ilona seemed dazed without her pleasure machine, as if she were stumbling through the hours with no purpose, no goal, no plan to her existence. Janos stayed next to her, but kept his eyes on Stoner. Under the pretext of phoning his parents in Budapest he had managed to get off a hurried message to Hong Kong. The reply he had received was even briefer: “Stay with Stoner.”
For long moments a silence stretched between Stoner and his wife. The howl of the plane’s powerful engines was muffled by heavy acoustical insulation but Stoner could sense the fury blazing within them, feel the heat and thrust as they shrieked through the cold darkness of the high stratosphere.