Ben Bova - Voyagers

“You expect me to believe you?”

“Of course. Have I ever lied to you, my dear?”

Her face contorted into a frustration that went beyond words. She disappeared back into the kitchen. Markov could hear pantry doors opening, canned goods banging onto the shelves.

She’ll break something, he thought.

With a sigh, he got up from the chair and went to the kitchen.

“Kwajalein?” he asked.

She was on tiptoe, shoving jars of pickled beets into the cabinet over the gas range. Over her shoulder, she grunted, “Kwajalein. Yes.”

“Here, let me.” He squeezed past her in the narrow space between the range and the refrigerator, and took a pair of cans to put away on the topmost shelves.

“Not those!” Maria snatched the cans from him. “They go here.”

He watched her put them where she wanted them, then accepted two other cans from her and stacked them neatly on the highest shelf, asking:

“Why do I have to go to Kwajalein? Why can’t I stay here at home?”

“Bulacheff specifically asked for you. The Academy is sending an elite team of scientists to join the Americans in studying the alien spaceship.”

“Is Bulacheff going too?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

“But you are.”

Markov leaned his lanky frame against the pantry doors. “But I have nothing to contribute to their studies! Haven’t we been through all this once already?”

“The American astronaut, Stoner, will be there.”

“Ah. My correspondent.”

“Exactly. He knows you, by reputation. That is why Bulacheff picked you to join the others.”

“I should never have written that book,” Markov muttered.

“You are an internationally recognized expert in extraterrestrial languages…”

“Which is to say, nothing,” he said.

“And you will be a part of the Soviet team of scientists that is going to Kwajalein to work with the Americans in studying this alien visitor.”

Markov shook his head sadly. “All I want, Maria, is to remain here in Moscow. At home. With you.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “On that score, you can rest comfortably. I will be going to Kwajalein with you.”

“You’re going!” He felt shocked.

“Of course. You are far too important to be allowed outside the Soviet Union unprotected.”

“Oh, come now, Maria,” he said, “are your superiors so frightened that I might defect to the West? I’m not a flighty ballet dancer, you know.”

“It’s for your own safety.”

“Of course.”

“Of course!” she snapped. “Don’t you think I care about your safety?”

He patted his shirt pockets, searching for a pack of cigarettes. “I think you care about the trouble it would make for you if I defected.”

“And all you care about is finding some young slut to pursue!”

He stood up straight. “Maria Kirtchatovska, I told you that I was alone in my office last night.”

“Yes, you told me.”

He pushed past her and went back to the living room. The cigarettes were on the table beside his favorite chair.

“But you didn’t tell me,” Maria said, following him like a determined bulldog, “that your little cow-eyed student from the research center has followed you back to Moscow.”

“What? Who are you talking about?”

“That Vlasov bitch…the one you were sleeping with at the research center.”

“Sonya?” Markov felt torn between joy and dread. “She’s in Moscow?”

“Look at you!” Maria snarled. “You’re having an erection already!”

He shook his head. “Maria, you don’t understand. She means nothing to me. She’s only a child. An overactive child.”

“Who’ll pull her pants down anytime you ask her to,” Maria said.

Sighing, Markov said, “Maria Kirtchatovska, you know me too well. I can’t resist. She throws herself at me. She’s lively, and rather good-looking.”

And young , Maria added silently. She swung her gaze to the mirror on the wall across the room. She looked at herself: a small, heavy woman with a complexion like bread dough and the face of a potato. In her imagination she pictured her husband with the buxom young beauty she had seen in his bed.

“You won’t have to resist her,” Maria said, her voice low, venomous. “She’ll never be at the university again. She’s on her way to a factory in the Ukraine, where she will study tractor repair.”

Markov’s mouth sagged open. “What have you…?”

“And you’re going to Kwajalein, with me,” Maria said.

His face turned red. “Woman, you go too far!” he roared, lurching toward her, hand upraised to strike.

But Maria held her ground. “You’re too late to do anything about it,” she said. “It’s already done. And you’re not going to be out of my sight for a minute, from now on.”

Markov stood there, flushed, perspiration trickling down his neck and into his collar.

“You just…sent her away? Ruined her chance for a career in astronomy? Just like that?”

Maria said nothing. She turned and walked slowly back to the kitchen, leaving Markov standing there in the middle of the living room, realizing for the first time the power that his wife held in her hands.

Keith Stoner sat in the hot, high sun and squinted out across the white sand beach. From here the atoll looked like a classic tropic paradise: graceful palms swaying in the sea breeze; breakers frosting white against the distant reef; the incredibly blue-green lagoon, calm and inviting; crystalline sky dotted with happy puffs of fat cumulus clouds riding the trade wind.

All we need is a wahine in a grass skirt, he said to himself.

But when he turned around and looked inward from the beach, he saw that the modern world had lain its unmistakable hand on Kwajalein. Squat gray cinder block buildings stood scant yards from the beach in a clearing that had been bulldozed where once there had been palms and plums and even an island variety of pine tree.

Further along the narrow flat island was the airstrip, garages and maintenance buildings, machine shops clanging in the hot sunshine, jeeps and trucks buzzing along the only road—a crushed coral track that led from the docks at the northern end of the island to the living compound at the south.

Above it all loomed the radio telescope antennas, six of them, a half-dozen huge dishes of metal and mesh that all pointed toward one invisible spot in the sky: the approaching spacecraft.

“Beachcombing?”

Stoner turned to see Jo Camerata walking toward him, shoeless in the sand, wearing cutoff jeans that showed her long legs well and a skimpy halter top. She was already tanned to a deep olive brown.

In the few days since they had arrived on the island, Stoner had managed to avoid her. But you knew you’d have to see her sooner or later, he told himself.

“Sort of,” he answered guardedly.

She smiled. “You’re dressed for it, all right.”

He was in an old pair of jogging shorts and a light shirt that hung loosely, unbuttoned, its sleeves rolled up above the elbow. The Navy’s repeated warnings about infection and jungle rot had convinced Stoner that he’d keep his socks and shoes on at all times.