Ben Bova - Voyagers

His voice sounded sleepy, grumpy, when he answered.

“It’s me,” she said. “Sally.”

“At this hour?”

“Be quiet and listen,” the President’s science adviser commanded. “I’ve got something that will make your boss the next President.”

No reply from the other end. I wonder if he’s alone in that waterbed of his? she wondered.

“Well?” he demanded.

“The President’s decided to inform the Russians about…you know.”

“JOVE?” he asked immediately.

“Yes. He’s going to use the Hot Line.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“When that becomes public knowledge, his chances of winning next November are gone.”

“I don’t know. He…”

“I do know,” Sally Ellington said. “Better than you. He’s finished, if and when this news leaks to the press.”

“So why are you telling me? If I tell the Secretary about it…”

She smiled to herself. “That’s your decision to make. I just wanted to be sure you knew.”

“I see.” His voice faltered momentarily, then, “I appreciate this, Sally. I owe you one.”

She nodded, picturing in her mind how he would repay her. In that waterbed.

In Massachusetts during the winter the sun sets by four o’clock. It was nearly six and as black as midnight outside the observatory windows as Jeff Thompson pored over the computer printouts that covered his desk.

Jo Camerata sat alongside him, tracing with her finger a long column of numbers. Thompson could smell a trace of herbal scent in her dark hair. Her fingernail was unpainted, but carefully shaped.

You’re a happily married man, Thompson told himself. Then he added, But you’re not dead!

“I know the figures look screwy,” Jo was saying, “but that’s what the computer is spitting out at us. I ran through the program three times, just to be sure, and the numbers came out the same each time.”

Thompson could feel the warmth of her body. She was almost rubbing her shoulder against his. Forcing himself to concentrate on the work in front of him, he asked, “And this is the latest run?”

“Yes,” she said. “All this column is the data from the latest set of Big Eye photographs.”

Thompson frowned at the numbers. It had been years since he’d been faced with a problem in orbital mechanics. Not since he had received his doctorate and gone to work at the observatory under McDermott’s direction had he been forced to calculate orbits and trajectories. That’s what graduate students were for: they did the dog work.

But this latest batch of numbers churned out by the computer made no sense. It looked so crazy that he had to give it his personal attention.

Thompson shook his head. “You’d better hand this set to Keith. It’s more in his line than mine.”

Jo moved slightly away from him. “I’m not allowed to go up there anymore. Professor McDermott doesn’t want me to see him.”

“You’re not a courier anymore?”

“No. Mac doesn’t even want me to talk to him on the phone.”

Pushing his eyeglasses back up over his brows, Thompson gave her a long look. “How do you feel about that? I thought you and Keith were, well…”

Jo shook her head. “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

“You can’t even phone him?”

She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “The phone at the house is tapped. Mac gets a record of all the incoming and outgoing calls.”

“Jesus Christ, we might as well be in Russia.”

Jo said nothing.

“Well,” Thompson said, “I guess somebody else’ll have to deliver this can of worms to him.”

“Or we could send it over the computer line,” Jo said softly. “He’s got a terminal up there at the house.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Am I doing something wrong?” Jo asked, looking back at the printouts. “Or is the computer glitching on us?”

“Damned if I know. I’ll have to work all night on this to figure out what’s wrong,” Thompson said.

“I must’ve made a mistake somewhere.” A gloomy note of self-criticism crept into her voice.

“You’ve been under a lot of pressure.”

“That’s no excuse.”

Thompson pushed his chair away from the desk slightly and straightened up from his usual hunched-over position. “Mac’s really leaning on you, huh?”

Jo smiled sadly. “More than you know.”

He could feel his blood pressure rising. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable.

“It’s a shame Keith dragged you into his crackpot scheme. It wasn’t very smart, writing to the Russians.”

“He didn’t tell them anything he wasn’t supposed to say!” she flared.

“That’s not what the Navy thinks.”

“He’s a good man,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody.”

Thompson grinned at her. “Neither would Chamberlain.”

“Who?”

“Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who caved in to Hitler at Munich.”

“Oh,” she said. “History.”

Suddenly Thompson felt very old.

They pored over the computer runs for another hour, but Thompson found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wanted to work on Jo, instead. Finally, with an enormous effort of will, he pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up.

“Look, kid, you’d better go home. It’s going to take the rest of the night for me to figure out where the glitch is.”

She looked concerned. “I’m willing to stay here and help you…”

“No,” he snapped, a bit desperately. “Go on home. Get some sleep. I’m going to phone my wife and tell her to tuck the kids in and keep supper warm for me. I’ve got three kids, you know.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Okay. Off you go. See you tomorrow.”

She got up from her chair, almost reluctantly, Thompson thought, and went to the door of his cubbyhole office. “I’ll check the data recorders downstairs before I go,” she said.

“Fine. Good night, Jo.”

He stared for a long while at the doorway after she left. Then he phoned home, but the line was busy. Nancy and her goddamned girl friends.

He turned his full attention to the computer printouts, trying to get the vision of Jo out of his mind.

But he heard her call, “Dr. Thompson!”

Looking up from the desk, he saw that she was back at the doorway, her face a mixture of worry and surprise.

“What’s wrong?”

“The signals,” Jo said, breathless with agitation. “They’ve stopped!”

“What?”

He bolted from his chair, barked his shin on the corner of the desk and hurried downstairs with her.

The big room was strangely quiet. No one else was there; the night shift wouldn’t come on for another hour. The big electronics consoles hummed softly to themselves. The tracing pens were strangely still, inking out dead-straight lines on the graph paper that unrolled slowly beneath them.

Thompson dashed around the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, found a headset and plugged it into the proper console.

He clapped one earphone to the side of his head.

Nothing.

Only the background hiss of the universe, laughing at him. The radio pulses were gone.