Ben Bova - Voyagers

“Okay. I’ll be back in ten—fifteen minutes. Don’t open the door for anybody; I’ve got my key.” He dangled the key from its ring. “Too many freaks out there this time of night to take any chances.”

“I’ll be all right,” Jo said.

“Okay.”

He pranced off, whistling off-key to himself.

Once he closed the heavy steel door behind him, Jo rose to her feet, stretched her cramped legs and arms and started some deep knee bends. The only sounds in the room were the sixty-cycle hum of the lights, the deeper rumble of the computer’s main core and her own rhythmic breathing.

The computer was working on something, a problem that was soaking up a large part of its capacity. It had been humming and blinking to itself without a single line of printout ever since Jo had shown up for her shift, nearly an hour ago.

Maybe it’s working on a problem for Keith, she thought as she bent down to sit on her heels. The corners of her lips tugged down. More than two weeks now and he hasn’t called, hasn’t even sent a message through Dr. Thompson or any of the other people who go up to the house.

He just doesn’t care, Jo realized. He doesn’t give a damn about me. I was just a convenient lay for him.

The phone rang.

Grunting, she got to her feet and went over to the handset built into the console, next to one of its keyboards.

“Computer center,” she said into the phone.

“This is Dr. Stoner,” Keith’s voice replied. He sounded slightly annoyed. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Keith…” She tried to mask the sudden breathlessness of her voice, tried to tell herself it was from the exertion of the exercises.

“Jo? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re working at the computer center now?”

She nodded, then realized how foolish it was. “Yes. That’s what they’ve got me doing now. I’m on the swing shift this week.”

“How are you?”

“I’m…” she hesitated, put her thoughts in order. “I’m all right, Keith. And you?”

“About the same.” His voice became guarded, too. “Not much we can say over the phone, is there?”

“No. I suppose the security regulations…”

“Yeah, I know.”

Suddenly there was nothing she could say.

After a moment’s silence, he asked, “How’s Big Mac treating you?”

A flash of electricity went through her. Does he know? she wondered.

“I heard from Jeff Thompson that he’s written a letter to NASA for you.”

She could feel the cold anger in his words. Just as coldly, she replied, “That’s right, Keith. He has.”

“Good for you,” he said acidly. “You’re a girl who knows what she wants. I hope you get it.”

You ignorant fool! she wanted to scream. You think I’m doing this for myself?

But she answered aloud, “I’m all right, Keith.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

“Why did you call?” she asked woodenly.

She heard him pull in a deep breath before he replied, “I punched in a trajectory problem a couple of hours ago and my terminal’s been dead silent ever since. What’s going on down there? The problem shouldn’t take that long for the computer to work out.”

“The machine’s been running ever since I came on shift,” she said. “Some of those special trajectory problems of yours have built-in subroutines that take a lot of time.”

“Well, check it out for me, will you?”

“Certainly,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

She waited for him to answer, to say something to her, anything. Even anger would mean that he cared.

Instead, he merely mouthed, “Thanks.”

He doesn’t care, she realized. He never cared. Not for an instant. He’s more worried about his goddamned computer program than about me.

“You’re quite welcome,” Jo said.

And hung up.

Stoner heard her voice, icy, as remote as the farthest star: “You’re quite welcome.”

The phone clicked dead.

The little bitch, he thought to himself. She’ll fuck anybody who can help her get what she wants. Well, I hope she’s enjoying herself with Big Mac.

He slammed the phone down, feeling the fury seething inside him, knowing that he was raging not at Jo, not even at McDermott, but at himself.

You’re quite a man, Stoner, he told himself. You sit here and let them hold you prisoner and tell yourself that your work is more important than personal ties and what you really want to do is kick the fucking door down and go out and grab her and carry her off to your cave.

“Just listen to that wind!”

Stoner jerked away from the phone to see Cavendish standing in the living room doorway, a brandy snifter in each hand.

With a deep, shuddering breath, he brought his raging emotions under control, forced his pounding heart to slow down, smothered the fury he felt burning inside him under a blanket of cold numbness.

“Are you all right?” Cavendish asked, crossing the big room toward him.

Stoner nodded, not trusting himself yet to speak. He accepted the snifter from Cavendish’s outstretched hand.

The old man lifted his glass and smiled wanly. “Cheers,” he offered.

“Cheers,” Stoner said. He sipped at the cognac. It slid down his throat like liquid fire.

Cavendish pulled the rocker up by the crackling fire and sat down with a weary sigh. “Quite a night out there,” he said. “Quite a night. You can hear the wind howling in the chimney.”

Going over to the easy chair that faced the old man, Stoner asked, “Why can’t you sleep?”

“H’mm? What?”

“You said you don’t sleep well.” It was a safe subject. Stoner could feel the anger damping down inside him, fading away to the hidden corner where it could remain without anyone knowing it was there.

“Bad dreams,” Cavendish answered, staring into the bright flames. “I was a prisoner of the Imperial Japanese Army for four years—just about the length of time it takes a photon to travel from Alpha Centauri to Earth.”

“Must have been rough,” Stoner said.

“Oh, that was only the beginning.” A heavy gust of wind rattled branches against the roof and Cavendish glanced up, his eyes haunted. “The Japanese moved us to Manchuria, you see, just in time to allow the Russians to capture us when they finally stepped into the Pacific war.”

“The Russians were on our side then.”

“They were on Stalin’s side. And Stalin decided that any scientist he could lay his hands on—even a young, starved, sick mathematical physicist—was going to stay in the Soviet Union and work for him, whether he wanted to or not.”

“They kept you in Russia?”

“In Siberia, actually. You boys had just set off your bloody atomic bomb, and Stalin was in an absolute sweat to catch up.”

“I thought they got their nuclear know-how from spies…”

“Nonsense! The only real secret about the atomic bomb was that it worked, that you could actually build one and it would explode satisfactorily. You gave that secret away at Hiroshima. Just as the biggest secret revealed by this alien spacecraft is that it exists—it came from somewhere other than Earth.”

“How long did they keep you inside Russia?”

“Years. Until Stalin died and his successors tried to ease tensions a bit. Even then, though, it wasn’t easy. They put me through hell and back before they let me go.”

“How come?”

Cavendish made a wry face. “The bloody KGB took it into their heads that I would make a marvelous espionage agent for them once I got back to England. I was treated to all sorts of brain-laundering techniques—and I do mean all sorts. That’s why I dread sleeping.”

His hands had started to shake.

“But you didn’t break,” Stoner said.