Voyagers I
Page 40
He was halfway through the hatch when he looked back at the alien, resting silently for countless ages. And his mind filled with the bickering voices and flint-eyed faces of all the bureaucrats he had ever known. And McDermott. And Tuttle. He saw Dooley in his mind’s eyes, the agents and policemen and politicians who didn’t understand, who feared, who resisted, who would not accept reality even when it was thrust at them.
And he saw Cavendish, twisted and destroyed by them. And Schmidt, smashed into a pulp with his own hands.
“Shtoner, retrofire is in one minute. All is automatic. I cannot stay.”
“It’s all right, Nikolai,” he said quietly, sliding back inside the spacecraft’s transparent hull. His boots touched the springy floor at the alien’s feet.
“You get back to Earth, Nikolai. I’m staying here.”
“Keith!” Jo’s strangled scream.
“Don’t commit suicide,” Markov pleaded.
“It isn’t suicide,” Stoner said to them all. “You think I’m killing myself, but I’m not. I’m giving you an incentive, a double reason to come out as quickly as you can and recapture this treasure house. Because I’ll be here—frozen. Maybe I’ll be dead. But just maybe…maybe, I’ll be preserved, suspended, waiting to be brought back to life.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s a vacuum in here. No air. Temperature’s pretty close to absolute zero. It’s preserved the alien for god knows how many millennia. It ought to preserve me for a couple of years.”
He took a breath, realized their reply couldn’t reach him for many seconds, and went on, “It’s cold enough to flash-freeze me once I turn my suit heater off. I’ll ride with the alien for a few years. If you really care about me you’ll come out and get me before the two of us leave the solar system altogether.”
“Keith, you can’t…” Jo’s voice broke into sobs.
“I won’t be dead,” he told her gently. “I’ll be waiting for you, frozen, suspended between life and death, waiting for you to reach me and bring me back to life. Like the tale of Sleeping Beauty, only with our roles reversed.”
Markov’s voice was filled with grief. “She can’t speak, Keith. She wants to, but she can’t.”
“Kirill…Jo, listen to me. Make them work together. Create a global space effort, make the politicians do what needs to be done. Get the whole human race involved in this. We have the chance to reach the stars, all of us, to come out of the cocoon that we’ve been living in. Make them understand, make them look to the stars.”
The delay seemed to get longer with each exchange.
“How can we?” Markov’s voice pleaded. “We’re only ordinary people. We need you, Keith. You must return to lead us!”
“No, Kirill,” he said firmly. “You’ll have to lead them. It’s all up to you now. You and Jo.”
He waited for a reply.
“Ten seconds to retrofire,” Federenko’s glum voice tolled. “I can’t do it,” Markov answered at last. “You must come back. You must!”
“Too late, Kirill. It’s in your hands now. You’ve got to change them—all of them. Change the world for me, Kirill.”
Federenko broke in, “Farewell, Shtoner. You are a very brave and very foolish man. Good luck.”
“So long, Nikolai. Stay in training.”
“Keith!” Markov’s voice begged.
Stoner turned off the radio and watched the Soyuz. Its retrorockets puffed soundlessly, a brief flare against the dark, and the craft slid away, silently speeding off, dwindling until it was lost against the stars.
He turned back to the alien, swallowed hard against the rawness in his throat. He tried to rub his aching eyes, but his hand bumped against the sealed visor of his helmet. Shrugging, he went back to describing everything he could see.
And as he did so, he wondered, Could he be frozen too? Not dead? Can we revive him someday?
He knew that human medical science knew of no way to revive a frozen body, not without rupturing the cells and killing the person. That was for the future. With a grim smile, Stoner thought, Maybe I’ll shame them into making progress on that front, as well.
Jo sat stiffly in her chair before the communications console, the tears dried from her eyes, leaving no trace of emotion on her face except the smudges down her cheeks. The other technicians, row after row of them at their consoles, tried not to glance in her direction as they directed Federenko’s return flight toward the landing area at Karaganda, some six hundred kilometers to the east.
Markov sat beside her, blank-faced, his eyes a million miles away. Stoner’s voice was weaker as it rasped, static-streaked, from the console speaker. He was describing the spacecraft’s interior as emotionlessly as a lecturer detailing an archaeological specimen.
Markov seemed to shake himself into awareness. He reached into his pockets for a cigarette, muttering, “He’s made his decision. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
She looked at the Russian and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.
“He isn’t dead,” Jo said softly. “He won’t die…not unless we fail him. We can reach him, bring him back to us, bring him back to life.”
Glancing at the armed guards still surrounding them, Markov said, “We have much work to do, then.”
“Yes,” Jo agreed. “But we can do it. We can change the world.”
Markov nodded grimly. “I never thought I would become a crusader…an evangelist.”
“But you will be, won’t you?”
“For you,” he said softly. “For him.”
“No,” Jo corrected. “For yourself. For all of us. For Russia and the whole world.”
A slow smile spread across his lips. “You are just as bad as he is.”
“Worse,” Jo said. “I’m here on Earth. I can watch your progress.”
Markov got to his feet, drew himself up to his full height. “It will be an interesting battle. I’ve never been inside the Kremlin, you know.”
Jo smiled up at him. “We’ll win the battle, Kirill. I know we will.”
He nodded and put the cigarette to his lips.
Jo turned back to the console. Stoner was still patiently describing the contents of the spacecraft-tomb:
“…there doesn’t appear to be anything like a periodic table of the elements, or anything else that I can recognize. If there’s a Rosetta stone aboard this ark, it’ll be some piece of scientific information that the alien civilization has worked out similarly to the way we’ve worked it out…”
Suddenly Jo heard herself telling Markov, “I’ve got to talk with him. One more time. Before…before it’s too late.”
Markov nodded.
“Alone…just the two of us, with no one else on the frequency.”
He grinned down at her. “You expect Russians to allow you to speak in private?” With a tug at his beard, Markov said, “Well, if we’re going to change the system, we might as well begin here and now.”
The messages were coming in from all across the Earth now. Stoner hovered inside the alien crypt, utterly spent, feeling the eternal cold of infinity congealing around him, turning him to lead. He listened to the voices that called to him.
The President of the United States sent his thanks and prayers and an assurance that America would bend every effort to reach the spacecraft and bring him back to Earth.
The head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, speaking on behalf of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., praised Stoner for his dedication to science and his bravery and promised that the Soviet Union would participate in any program to reach the spacecraft.
His Holiness, the Pope, spoke personally to Stoner, promised that he would work unceasingly to save his body and would offer daily prayers for the preservation of his soul.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, the Vice-Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, Jeff Thompson from Kwajalein, politicians from Britain and Japan, scientists from other lands, people Stoner had never heard of—all the voices of Ear
th spoke to him, one by one, growing fainter, farther removed, whispering against the crackling background radio noise of the cosmos.
And then a voice he recognized.
“Keith, Keith, this is Kirill. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, Kirill. Faintly.”
“Jo wants to speak to you…privately, on frequency four. No one else will eavesdrop, I promise you.”
A burst of static from some unseen star rasped in his earphones. Stoner waited it out, then answered, “I’m switching to frequency four.”
For long moments he heard nothing but background hiss and crackle. Then:
“Keith…oh, god, Keith, what can I say?”
Say you love me, he thought. But he replied merely, “I’m here, Jo. I can hear you.”
The time waiting for her response was an eternity. “Why, Keith? Why have you done this? Why didn’t you come back to me?”
He smiled sadly. “I’m a blackmailer, Jo. I’m holding a hostage to force them to come up here to the rescue. I’m shaming them into it.”
Silence, except for the sibilant whisperings of the stars. Finally:
“And what about me, Keith? Don’t you care about me?”
“Farewell, Roxanne,” he quoted lamely, “for today I die…And my heart, so heavy with love I have not told, cries out…” But he couldn’t remember the rest.
He flexed his gloved fingers as he waited for her reply. It was getting difficult to move. His blood was turning to ice.
“Did you mean that?” she asked shakily. “Do you love me, Keith?”
It was safe to tell her now. “Of course I do, Jo. I’ve loved you for a long time.”
He waited for response. The seconds ticked by, longer and longer.
“And I love you, Keith.” Her voice was faint, barely discernible above the background static in his earphones. “I love you.”
He had nothing else to say. His lips were growing numb.
“We’ll come for you, Keith! We will!”
“I know you will, Jo. Don’t let them stop you, kid. Don’t let them forget. I’ll be here, waiting for you.”
With a final shuddering breath, he clicked off the heater in his suit.
CHAPTER 46
Jo stood alone in the twilight shadows on the roof of the barracks building. She had gone up there to cry.
The floodlamps weren’t on yet, and an evening star hung low over the horizon, shining brilliantly. For a moment she fantasized that it was the alien spacecraft bearing Keith inside it.
The breeze sighed down from the hills, dry and warm. She could hear the faint, tinny noise of a radio somewhere off in the gathering darkness. With a startled shock of understanding, she realized that the voice on the radio was speaking English. An American broadcast, she said to herself. They’re letting an American broadcast through!
It was a news broadcast, of course. “Reaction” stories to the long day’s events, now that Stoner was permanently out of reach.
Jo listened, despite herself. The announcer was reading an item about a flying saucer organization in Missouri that indignantly maintained that the alien aboard the spacecraft was not of the same race as the aliens who had been sending UFOs to Earth.
“According to the Missouri saucer experts,” the announcer said archly, “we have found the wrong aliens.”
Instead of crying, Jo smiled. There are so many fools in the world, she thought. So many. She lifted her face to the heavens, to the stars that were starting to appear in the darkening sky.
“Thanks, Keith,” she whispered into the night. “They’ll have to send a team of astronauts to pick you up and bring you and your friend back to Earth. It’ll take a few years to put it all together, but when they go out after you, I’ll be with them.”
Then she turned and headed downstairs, dry-eyed, head high, determined to get to Houston as quickly as possible to begin her training.
* * *
Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have. We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search the chance of success is zero.
GIUSEPPE COCCONI and PHILIP MORRISON 1959
* * *
About the Author
Ben Bova is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed science writer. He has writer more than sixty books, both fiction and non-fiction. A former editor of both Analog and Omni magazines, he is currently editing the Ben Bova Discovery Series for Tor Books. His most recent novel is Cyberbooks, also published by Tor. Mr. Bova lives in West Hartford, CT.
VOYAGERS
Copyright © 1981 by Ben Bova
All rights reserved
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24 Street
New York, NY 10010
ISBN: 978-0-8125-0076-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 80-2836