Ben Bova - Voyagers

Jo said nothing.

“That’s why they want to keep this news away from men like Sagan and Phil Morrison. Those men have international reputations. They can get the United Nations or some other international organization to make a united, worldwide program out of this. The military doesn’t want that! They won’t allow it! That’s why they’ve got me bottled up here like a prisoner. That’s why they want to move the whole damned operation off to some military base. They want to keep the whole damned thing a secret.”

“I know that.”

“Well, I’m going to blow the lid off this thing,” Stoner said, waving the envelope in one hand. “That’s what this letter is all about.”

“Keith, you’re only going to get yourself in real trouble.”

“We’re in real trouble now,” he countered, “and as long as they can keep this thing secret, the whole world is in trouble.”

“I don’t know if I should mail this for you, Keith,” Jo said.

He walked over to the bed, sat on its edge beside her. “Mail it. They can’t put me into any deeper trouble than I am now. And it’s important that the whole scientific community learns about what’s going on here.”

Reluctantly, Jo took the letter from his hand. She looked at the address, then turned and placed the envelope on the bed table beside her purse.

Stoner didn’t tell her that the second sheet in the envelope was addressed to one of the authors whose book he had read a few nights earlier. A Russian linguist who had written an interesting monograph about possible extraterrestrial languages: Professor Kirill Markov, of Moscow.

More weeks went by, and Stoner patiently worked by himself while the wrangling went on in the next room.

McDermott promised us a warm winter, Stoner grinned to himself. It’ll be April Fools’ Day before we get out of New England.

Thompson brought the Englishman to the house on a bitterly cold morning, one of those New England days when the sun shines brilliantly out of an absolutely blue sky, but the air is a frigid mass of biting dry polar stuff that slides in from Canada and sends thermometers down to zero for days on end.

From inside the house it looked beautiful: bright sunshine glittering on pristine snow, trees stretching bare limbs into the crystal sky. Stoner spent all of two minutes admiring it when he first arose.

He was quickly down in the dining room, chugging away at the computer keyboard, exasperated because there just weren’t enough early observations of the spacecraft to get a true fix on its origin. A blast of cold air told him that someone had just come in through the door in the rear of the kitchen.

Stoner didn’t bother looking up. The computer terminal was starting to rattle off the answers to his latest equations, typing automatically, chattering across the paper at an inhumanly mad speed, numbers and symbols springing across the sheets faster than his eyes could follow.

Jeff Thompson called, “Hi, Keith. Busy?”

Stoner turned in the dining room chair, an acid reply on his tongue, but saw that Thompson had an older man with him.

“Keith, this is Professor Roger Cavendish.”

Stoner saw a man of about sixty, tall but very spare, thinning white hair, bony skull of a face, deepset eyes, bushy eyebrows. He stood there in his overcoat and scarf, gloves in one hand, and gave Stoner a quizzical half-smile.

“Professor Cavendish?” Stoner asked. “From Jodrell Bank?”

“Yes,” Cavendish said softly. “Quite. Don’t tell me my reputation has preceded me?”

“Your work on organic molecules in interstellar clouds isn’t exactly obscure,” Stoner said, getting up from his chair and extending his hand to the Englishman.

Cavendish’s hand was cold, his grip lukewarm.

“And you’re Stoner, the astronaut, eh?”

“Former astronaut.”

“Yes. Quite.”

Thompson took the coats and yelled in from the kitchen that he would put on a kettle for tea.

“There’s instant coffee, if you prefer,” Stoner suggested.

Cavendish actually shuddered.

Stoner walked into the living room. Cavendish’s impressive brows went up when he saw the pool.

“My god, what splendor. Is it heated?”

“Yes.”

“Of course, how stupid of me. Otherwise it’d be a skating rink in this weather, wouldn’t it?”

Stoner grinned. “Well, there’s a lot of hot air pumped into this room. The military and logistics types have their meetings in here.”

“Ah. I see. Naturally, they’d take the best facilities for themselves.”

Gesturing him to an armchair, Stoner asked, “What brings you to this place?”

Cavendish sat down and stretched pipestem legs. He was the perfect picture of an English academic: baggy tweed suit, sweater beneath his jacket, drooping little bow tie.

“NATO, actually,” he replied. “Your intelligence people have been asking some interesting questions about radio signals, so our intelligence people put two and two together and finally NATO got into the act. One thing led to another, and here I am.”

“You’re representing NATO?”

“Quite.”

“And you’ll go with us when we move to Arecibo, or Kwajalein, or wherever they put us?”

“Lord, I hope not. Spent enough of my life in tropical paradises.”

Stoner sank back into his armchair, thinking, So they’ve brought NATO into it. Maybe my letter to Claude helped. I wonder if he forwarded the note to that Russian linguist?

Thompson came in with a tray bearing three mugs. Stoner took his and saw that it was black coffee. One sip, though, convinced him never to allow Thompson to make coffee for him again.

“Professor Cavendish was a prisoner of war for nearly five years,” Thompson said. “In the Pacific.”

“Burma, actually,” said Cavendish. “Bridge over the River Kwai and that sort of thing. Very nasty. Best forgotten, if you can.”

Within minutes their national origins and earlier lives were forgotten as they started talking shop.

“There’s just not enough data,” Stoner admitted, “to backtrack the thing’s point of origin. I don’t think we’ll ever figure out where it came from.”

“But you have enough to show that it couldn’t have been launched from Jupiter,” Cavendish said.

“I think so,” Stoner said. “We’ve tried every possible launch window. If the spacecraft appeared near Jupiter at the same time the radio pulses started, there isn’t any possible way it could have been launched from Jupiter itself. No way.”

“It’s a negative proof,” Thompson said.

“All the stronger for that,” said Cavendish. “If we can definitely rule out Jupiter as the origin of our visitor, then that’s quite an accomplishment.”

“I suppose the next step would be to rule out the other planets.”

“Easily done. I should think your computer could crunch through those numbers quickly enough.”

Stoner stretched his legs out and slouched back on his chair. He put the steaming coffee cup on his belt buckle and said, “So it’s definite—the thing came from outside the solar system. We have the numbers to prove that.”

“We will have,” Thompson said, “in a few days.”

“But that makes things even more puzzling, doesn’t it?” said Cavendish.

“How so?”

“Well, if it came from outside the solar system, from another star, it must have taken thousands of years for the blasted thing to reach this far. Millions of years, more likely.”

“If it’s an unmanned probe…”

“Even unmanned”—Cavendish waved his emptied teacup—“a piece of machinery that can stay intact and operate reliably for millennia? For eons? Difficult to believe.”

“For human machinery.”