Ben Bova - Voyagers

“What’d you do to get sent out here? Rape a nun?”

Reynaud looked down at the golden angel’s face. “Hardly.”

They shared the joint until there wasn’t enough left to hold without scorching their fingers. Schmidt carelessly flicked it into the lagoon.

“Plenty more where that came from,” he said, his voice lazy, relaxed.

Reynaud’s head was spinning. Shakily, he climbed to his feet. “I think I’d better be getting back…”

“Stay here. Maybe the damned spaceship will drop right into the lagoon and then we can all go home.”

“It’s still more than fifty million kilometers away.”

“All right then!” Schmidt suddenly hiked himself up to a sitting position. “Let’s go meet the damned thing halfway.”

“What do you mean?”

With a knowing grin, “In my room…I’ve got some pills that can take you right out to the stars, zoom ! Just like that. Bought them from one of the civilians who runs the Post Exchange.”

“No, I don’t think…”

But Schmidt struggled to his feet and grabbed Reynaud by one arm. “Come on, I’ll show you. Nothing to be afraid of. Better than alcohol. Come on with me.”

Reynaud let the young man drag him up the beach, toward the BOQ.

Stoner paced back and forth across the hot, stuffy control center, threading his way around the jumble of chairs and standing men and women. A dozen technicians sat at their humming electronics consoles, headsets clamped over their ears, eyes riveted to their green-glowing screens.

The room was dark except for the glow from the screens and the lighted buttons on the console keyboards. There were too many people standing around, radiating heat and anticipation, overpowering the rumbling air conditioners.

Stoner prowled ceaselessly, like a caged jungle cat, scowling at the backs of the seated technicians and the shimmering numbers on their readout screens.

The outside door opened and a painful spear of sunlight lanced into the room. Everyone flinched and squirmed. Vampires, thought Stoner. We’re like a pack of goddamned vampires, hiding from the light of day.

It was Markov. He closed the door quickly and tiptoed, in his gangly, loose-jointed way, to Stoner’s side.

“Anything?” he whispered.

“Zilch,” Stoner said. “It’s been damned near six hours and no reaction from them at all.”

Markov peered at the nearest screen. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sad.”

“Sad,” snapped Stoner.

The Russian shrugged. “I have a message for you from the photo lab. They have received the latest high-resolution photographs from Greenbelt.”

Stoner pulled his attention from the screens. “From Big Eye? Did they take a look at them? How do they look?”

“They said…not good.”

What did you expect? Stoner asked himself. Nothing is going right. Not a goddamned thing.

“I’d better go over and take a look at them.”

Markov said, “They told me that the photos still don’t show anything except a blur. It looks almost like the head of a comet.”

“Christ! Don’t say that around McDermott. That’s all he’ll need to renege on the rendezvous mission.”

Dr. Marvin Chartris leaned back in his padded swivel chair and looked through the heavily barred window of his ground floor office. Outside on the scruffy, patchy lawn of the museum, a pair of dogs were enthusiastically humping, tongues lolling out of their toothy mouths, while a dozen children stood around watching.

Ah, springtime in Manhattan, thought Dr. Chartris.

His phone rang.

Chartris glanced out the open office door. As usual, his secretary was nowhere in sight. He had once replied to a visitor’s question as to how many people worked at the museum, “About a third of the staff.” His secretary was among the majority.

With a sigh, he picked up the phone. “Planetarium,” he said.

“Marv,” crackled the voice on the other end, “this is Harry Hartunian.”

“Hello, Harry. How’s everything in San Diego?”

“Great. Getting good crowds. How about you?”

“Almost breaking even.”

“Been mugged lately? I hear New York’s worse in good weather.”

“When do we get good weather?” Chartris countered.

Hartunian chuckled. “Hey, Marv, you got any information about unusual sunspot activity? Or solar flares? I been trying to get Kitt Peak Observatory to tell me what’s going on, but they won’t say a word.”

“You too?”

“Whattaya mean, me too?”

Chartris shifted in his chair, squirming like a precocious schoolboy who was being ignored by the teacher.

“I’ve been getting calls from all over the map,” he explained, “since last Tuesday. Everybody’s seeing aurorae…”

“Yeah. There was a big display here last night.”

“As far as I know, there’s no unusual solar activity. I’ve checked Kitt Peak, the Smithsonian, even some friends at NASA. No solar flares, not even much in the way of sunspots right at the moment.”

“Then what the hell caused last night’s aurora? We don’t get the Northern Lights down here—I mean, it just doesn’t happen here!”

Scratching his head, Chartris said, “Darned if I know, Harry. But you’re not the only one who’s got them. Denver, Salt Lake City, even Las Vegas saw them during this past week. Through the neon.”

“You seen it in New York?”

“Are you kidding? We’re lucky when we see the full Moon around here.”

Hartunian didn’t laugh. “What’s going on, Marv? Any ideas?”

“Not the slightest. Whatever it is, it’s extremely unusual.”

“Unusual? It’s damned scary!”

The conference room in the computer building was too small to accommodate the entire Project JOVE staff, and Ramsey McDermott liked it that way. He wanted only the top echelon people, not the flunkies.

“Keep the peons at their work,” he muttered to himself as he walked the few steps down the corridor from his office to the conference room.

McDermott had taken the most spacious office on the ground floor of the computer building for his own. It was the most impressive and comfortable office on the island, except for that of the Navy captain who commanded the military staff. Captain Youngblood had a larger office, but it was in the old military administration building, with its leaky window air conditioners and the airstrip right outside. Lieutenant Commander Tuttle had a broom closet next door to his captain’s office.

But McDermott had the central air conditioning and restful quiet of the computer building. His office befitted the project director, a respected senior scientist who reported straight to the White House, who was in line for a Nobel Prize, if everything worked out well.

He always made certain to arrive late enough for these weekly staff leaders’ conferences so that everyone else was already present: Zworkin and his two top aides, plus their linguist, Markov; Cavendish, representing NATO; the three rotating dark-skinned types from the UN; the three Chinese, who had yet to utter their first word at these conferences; Reynaud, the Vatican’s representative; and Thompson, representing McDermott’s own group from the United States, with two of his aides.

One of them was Stoner.

McDermott frowned at Stoner’s presence. The man was a troublemaker and had been from the start. He was always insisting on planning for a manned space flight to meet the approaching spacecraft.