Ben Bova - Voyagers

A small crowd was piling up at the doorway behind Tuttle, waiting to have their final word with the guest of honor. His aides fidgeted nervously and looked at their wristwatches.

“Well, we’re trying,” Wilson said. “It’s a long, hard road.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“So why’s the Navy at my party? Who was that admiral just went by?”

Tuttle laughed and heard himself say, “Maybe the Navy’s getting religion.”

Wilson grinned back at him.

“Something big is happening, Willie,” Tuttle whispered suddenly, uncontrollably. “Something so big that it’s going to blow everybody’s mind.”

“What do you mean, Freddie?”

Gesturing halfheartedly at the others milling around them, Tuttle whispered, “It’s too soon to say. But it’s big. Enormously big. As soon as we can verify that it’s really true, I’ll get word to you.”

Wilson put on his best smile. “That’s fine, Freddie. But what’s it all about?”

Shaking his head, Tuttle said, “You’ll know when I tell you. Nothing like it’s ever been seen before. All I can say is—watch the skies.”

“Lord, you make it sound like the Second Coming.”

“Maybe it is,” Tuttle answered, completely serious. “Maybe it is.”

Stoner pecked hesitantly at the computer keyboard. The typewriterlike terminal was perched shakily on the dining room table. The video screen readout unit sat next to it, flickering with pale green letters and symbols that danced across its screen. The dining room was littered with stacks of printout sheets and photographs. The entire side wall of the dining room was filled with bookshelves that Stoner had cobbled together out of boards and bricks, with the help of his security guards. Every shelf bulged with books.

He didn’t have the house to himself, though.

In addition to the brawny young Navy guards who patrolled the grounds and prowled periodically through the house, cluttering the kitchen and checking all the doors and windows, there was a growing stream of visitors from Washington and elsewhere taking up the big living room, next to the pool. Military men, most of them, with bundles of logistical plans in their briefcases. Stoner could hear them arguing, sometimes shouting at each other, through the thick sliding doors of the dining room. Arguments about food requirements and bedding, insurance tables and electronic spare parts.

Stoner tried to avoid them as much as he could. They were welcome to the living room as long as they didn’t interfere with his work. He shut their brassy voices out of his mind and concentrated on tracking the orbit of the spacecraft, using the Big Eye photographs and the computer to analyze its path.

It has to be a spacecraft, he kept telling himself. It can’t be a natural object.

McDermott came to the house regularly, and not even the heaviest oaken doors could muffle the old man’s deep, booming voice. Tuttle was there often, as well, but the little lieutenant commander was too deeply engrossed in planning their move to say anything to a mere astrophysicist.

Despite himself, Stoner could hear bits and pieces of their discussions. The project had acquired a code name: Project JOVE. And their arguing was mostly about where to place Project JOVE. McDermott kept bellowing about Arecibo. But more and more the other voices countered with another name: Kwajalein.

“What are you doing?” Jo asked.

She sat up in the bed, tucking the sheet modestly under her armpits. It was early morning, a quiet Sunday in mid-November. Crisp sunshine filtered through the bedroom curtains of the New Hampshire house.

Jo had arrived on Friday evening, as usual, with a heavy folder of photographs from Big Eye under her arm. They were stamped Confidential and addressed to Stoner. The photos were beamed by laser from the orbiting telescope to NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Maryland. From there they were transmitted by secure wirephoto cable to the Navy headquarters in Boston’s virtually deserted waterfront. Jo picked them up at the gray Navy building each Friday afternoon and drove them up to Stoner in New Hampshire. And stayed the weekend.

He was sitting at the little maple writing desk the Navy guards had found for him, bent over a sheet of paper.

“I’m writing a letter,” he replied, “to an old friend of mine. One of my former teachers. He’s an astrophysicist: Claude Appert. Lives in Paris.”

“He’s French?” Jo asked.

“As French as the Eiffel Tower.” Stoner finished addressing the envelope and turned in his chair to face Jo. “I want you to mail this for me when you get back to Cambridge.”

Her brows arched upward.

“They won’t let me mail anything out of here,” Stoner explained. “Especially overseas.”

“What’s in the letter?” she asked.

He folded two flimsy sheets of paper and tucked them into the envelope. “I’m asking him if anybody in the European astronomical community has picked up unusual radio signals from Jupiter.”

“That’s a security violation, isn’t it?” Jo pointed out.

With a shake of his head, Stoner said, “I didn’t say we had found anything. I just asked if he’s heard anything.”

Jo said, “The Navy wouldn’t…”

“Listen to me,” he snapped. “They’re using us, Jo. Do you understand? Using us. We’ve stumbled across an incredible discovery, and all they can think of is to keep it secret and try to turn it to their own military advantage.”

“But…”

“But nothing! We spend our lives squeezing out every drop of knowledge about the universe that we can, and they treat us like civil servants. They take our knowledge and turn it into weapons. They throw us in the gutter whenever they feel like it, whenever they decide to cut down on the money they spend for research. Cattle are treated better! The government spends more money subsidizing the goddamned tobacco industry—causing cancer—than it spends on cancer research.”

“What’s that got to do with the radio signals?” Jo asked softly.

Stoner was on his feet now, lecturing, forgetting that he was naked. “When we come up with some hint of power, with some new idea that might help them control people or kill them, then they put us into harnesses and won’t let us work on anything else.”

“We don’t live in a peaceful world, Keith.”

“I know that. But what’s Tuttle’s first reaction to the possibility that we’ve found intelligent life? Not awe. Not even curiosity. Not even fear! They want to lay their hands on any new technology the aliens might have—so that they can improve their weaponry.”