Ben Bova - Voyagers

Trembling inside, McDermott heard himself tell her, “I suppose I could tell the Navy that he’s too valuable to the project to be sent to jail.”

Jo nodded eagerly.

“But why should I? Why should I risk the project’s chance of success for him? What’s in it for me?”

For several moments she said nothing. McDermott could hear his pulse pounding in his ears.

Finally he could stand it no longer. “If I…saved his neck, what would you do?”

Understanding dawned in her eyes. She sat up straighter in the chair. “What would I do?”

“For me.”

She almost smiled. “What would you want me to do?”

Taking the pipe out of his mouth, still unlit, McDermott said shakily, “Stop seeing him. Spend your time with me instead.”

She nodded slowly. “And what do I get out of that?”

He felt confused. “What do you mean…?”

“I want a letter of recommendation from you, to NASA. A letter recommending me for a position in the astronaut training corps.”

“You want…”

“I’ll give you what you want, if you give me what I want.”

“And Stoner?”

“He stays with the project. I’ll stop seeing him. You write the letter.”

Swallowing hard, McDermott answered, “When…when the project is finished. I’ll write the letter then. We have a lot of work ahead of us, you know.”

“You could still send the letter off to NASA. Now. I’ll stay with the project until it’s finished.”

His head was throbbing. “It’s not that simple, young lady. If you expect me to…”

“I’ll do what you want,” Jo said. “But first you write that letter.”

“I…we’ll see about that. I have to think about this.”

Jo got up from her chair and clamped the books under her arm, against her hip. “Okay, you see about it. When you give me the letter and guarantee that Dr. Stoner will stay with the project, I’ll live up to my end of the deal.”

She went to the door, turned back to him. “Uh, just so we understand each other…I’m not into bondage or S&M, but anything else you want I can give you.”

McDermott sat in a hot sweat as she left his office and shut the door firmly behind her.

Markov sat like a guilty schoolboy in the anteroom, waiting, waiting endlessly. Academician Bulacheff’s secretary, a portly woman of fifty or more, glared at him now and then. Men shuttled in and out of the academician’s office. But no one spoke to Markov.

Outside it was snowing. Markov watched the white flurries paste themselves against the windowpanes. Little by little, Moscow disappeared from sight beneath the snow-filled gusts. Even the spires and walls of the Kremlin became indistinct blurs.

A real blizzard, Markov told himself. It will be a long walk home.

Finally, when he had nearly hypnotized himself into a snow-induced slumber, the secretary’s nasal voice rasped, “Kirill Vasilovsk Markov?”

He snapped to full alertness. There was no one else in the anteroom, but still she made a question of his name.

“Yes, that’s me,” he said.

“Academician Bulacheff will see you now.”

Markov got to his feet, a trifle unsteadily, and walked to the plain wooden door of the academician’s office.

Bulacheff is the key man, he heard his wife’s voice warning him. He is the one you must satisfy. If you can convince him that the signals are not a language, then all may be well. But if he is dissatisfied with your work…. Maria had let the sentence dangle, like a noose over Markov’s head.

Bulacheff’s office was neither spacious nor imposing, but a cheerful gleaming samovar chugged away in one corner of the neat little room. And the academician came up from behind his desk and greeted Markov warmly.

“Kirill Vasilovsk! It was good of you to come in person. I hope you are not caught by the snow on your way home.”

Markov smiled and nodded and mumbled polite inanities, thinking, I had to come in person, you summoned me. And how can I avoid being caught in the snow, unless we stay here until spring?

“I have read your report,” the academician said, returning to his desk. “Most interesting. Most interesting.”

He winked at Markov, then reached down to the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a bottle of vodka and two glasses.

“It’s not iced,” he said apologetically.

Markov grinned at the old man. “Not to worry. I am already chilled quite thoroughly.”

Bulacheff gestured his guest to the worn leather sofa at the side of the room. Portraits of Mendeléev, Lobachevski, Oparin and Kapitza hung in gilt above the sofa. The inevitable portrait of Lenin was over the academician’s desk. But no contemporary politicians, Markov noted.

He accepted a thimble-sized glass of vodka. Bulacheff toasted, “To understanding.”

They both downed their drinks in a single gulp.

As Bulacheff wheeled his swivel chair to refill Markov’s glass, the linguist said, “It was good of you to find time for me. I know you must be very busy.”

Bulacheff’s bald pate gleamed in the light from the panels in the ceiling. “Actually,” he said, “I am very glad to see you. I want to discuss this Jupiter business with someone who is not in the Academy, not part of the official apparatus.”

“Oh?”

With an almost sheepish smile, Bulacheff eased back in his chair. “It is only too easy to become isolated in a position such as mine. The people I see are all members of the Academy or the government. Sometimes we become too ingrown; we lose sight of the important things because we are so concerned with the immediate problems of the moment.”

Holding his refilled glass in front of him, Markov nodded. “I see.”

“It is good to discuss this matter of”—Bulacheff inadvertently glanced ceilingward—“of ETI with a man of science, rather than an apparatchik.”

Is he looking to the heavens or for microphones in the ceiling, Markov wondered. He said, “It’s a matter of grave importance, true enough.”

“Yes,” Bulacheff agreed. “And the Americans are a jump ahead of us—as usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“This man Stoner…this idealist who wrote you that letter—do you know who he is?”

Markov shook his head.

“Our embassy in Washington reports that he was one of the astronomers who helped design and build the orbiting telescope that the Americans launched recently: they call it the Big Eye.”

“A telescope in orbit? Like a sputnik?”

“Exactly. No doubt the Americans are using it to study Jupiter very closely…much more closely than we can, since we have no such equipment in orbit.”

Markov stroked his beard with his free hand. “So they have found things that we cannot see.”

“Exactly! They have eyes and we are blind.”

“That’s…too bad.”

Bulacheff knocked back his vodka and put the glass carefully on his desk. “Science depends on politics. It has always been so. Capitalist or socialist, it makes no difference. We want to study the universe but we must beg for the money from the politicians.”

Markov agreed. “Even in the beginnings of science, great men such as Galileo and Kepler had to cast horoscopes for their patrons if they wanted to be supported for their true work.”

“Yes. And nowadays we have to invent weapons for them.”

Peering ceilingward himself, Markov said, “But that is necessary for the defense of the Motherland.”

“Of course,” Bulacheff said brusquely. Then he added, “And for the triumph of socialism.”

“It’s too bad we don’t have an orbiting telescope of our own,” Markov said.

“It would take ten years to get one into space—nine of them wheedling and begging.”

“I wonder…is there any way we can get to use the American telescope? Or to see the photographs they have taken?”