Ben Bova - Voyagers

“You’re not from the insurance company?” Willie asked, spreading his arms across the back of the couch.

The young man sitting on the chair facing him smiled. “No, sir, I’m not. I’m with the Department of Justice.”

“Justice?” Willie glanced at his brother, who stood uneasily by the empty, unused bar, an almost scared look on his ruddy face.

“Yes, sir,” said the young man. He was neatly dressed in a conservative gray suit and quiet maroon tie. He looks like a lawyer, Willie thought.

“What do you want with me?” Willie asked him.

“We want to prevent a tragedy from happening,” the young man said.

“We?”

“The Department. The Attorney General. The White House.”

Willie gave a low whistle. “Heavy stuff.”

The young man nodded.

“What tragedy are you worrying about?” Willie asked.

“The panic you’ve been spreading.”

“Panic? I don’t deal in panic. I’m just a simple minister spreading the Word of the Lord.”

“Sir, you are frightening people. What happened at RFK Stadium could have been a colossal tragedy. It was only avoided by the narrowest of margins.”

“By his quick thinking!” Bobby snapped, jabbing a finger toward his brother.

“It was the Lord’s doing, not mine,” Willie said softly, still smiling.

“Reverend Wilson, you are frightening people. It was bad enough when you were just telling them to watch the skies. But now—with these lights in the sky every night…”

“That’s the message we’ve been waiting for,” Willie said.

“People are scared! They think the end of the world is coming.”

“I never said that.”

“But that’s what people believe you’re saying,” the young man said earnestly. “All over the country.”

“I’m just a simple minister of the Lord…”

“You’ve become a powerful national figure, Reverend Wilson. And you’ve got to show some responsibility for that power.”

“What do you mean, responsibility?” Bobby asked.

“You’ve got to cool it.”

“What?”

“You’ve got to stop scaring people. You’ve got to tell them that the lights in the sky have nothing to do with God or the end of the world.”

“I can’t do that,” Willie said flatly.

“You’ll have to.”

“Or else what?” Bobby asked.

The young man turned slightly in his chair to face Bobby. “Or else the federal government will get very tough with you.”

Willie’s smile never faded. He said, “I’ve met with the President, you know.”

“Yes, sir, I know. He sent me here, Reverend. He asked me to remind you of the tremendous responsibility you hold in your hands.”

“The President did?”

“That’s right, sir. He could have sent someone from IRS. Or from FCC.”

Willie’s smile became a shade tighter, just a little forced.

“In other words,” Bobby grumbled, “we play ball or the government shuts us off from television and goes through our books with a hundred auditors.”

“What do you mean, play ball?”

“Where is your next big rally, Reverend Wilson?”

“Anaheim.”

The young man nodded. “Yes. We’ve already been in contact with the stadium management there.”

“What right do you have…?”

“It’s very simple, Reverend. A panic at one of your rallies could kill hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. None of us wants that to happen. Right?”

Willie nodded slowly.

The young man took a deep breath. “Then what you have to tell your followers is that the lights in the sky are completely natural, that they’re caused by the spacecraft that’s approaching us, and that there is no supernatural meaning behind the lights whatsoever. You must disassociate the lights in the sky from the voice of God.”

“But that’s not possible,” Willie said.

“Yes, it is. You’ll have to say it.”

Willie glanced up at his brother, then looked back at the man from the Justice Department. “You’re interfering with the Lord’s work.”

“You work for the Lord, sir. I work for the Attorney General.” He hesitated, then added, “And we all work for the IRS.”

It was sunset before Stoner emerged from his office building. He stood at the entrance for a moment and looked out through the fringe of palms across the street toward the flaming sky. Then he turned and headed for the Post Exchange.

An hour later, showered, dressed in clean slacks and pullover shirt, he walked from the BOQ to the hotel, only to find that Jo wasn’t there. With a shrug, he went to the computer building, then to the Officers’ Club. She wasn’t in either place.

Where the hell could she be? he wondered. The clock behind the club bar showed it was well past seven. She said she was going for a swim; if anything had happened to her the whole island would be buzzing with it.

He made his way past the hardy group of regulars who lined the bar and sat wearily in the same corner booth he and Markov had used before.

She couldn’t have forgotten, he knew. She just decided not to show up. Cold anger seeped through him. She’s probably with McDermott.

No matter where Cavendish walked, no matter how far he decided to go or which direction he decided to go in, his feet kept returning him to the hospital.

It was dusk now, and as he leaned against the bole of a palm across the tennis courts from the hospital’s blocky shape, he could see lights going on in the windows.

I’ve got no will of my own, he whimpered deep within himself. They’re controlling me, making me walk and talk like some bloody animated doll.

He sagged against the tree. The pain wasn’t so bad at the moment, but nothing could make it go away altogether. Only obedience to their commands alleviated the agony.

“Damned clever of them,” he muttered to himself. “If they devoted as much effort to bettering their blasted economy as they do to controlling people’s minds, they wouldn’t need their blasted KGB.”

The pain wasn’t so bad now. Maybe I could get some food down, he thought. Or sleep! He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Sleep. What a luxury that would be.

Cavendish never saw Schmidt raise his window, lean out over its edge and drop the two floors to the sandy soil at the base of the hospital wall. The young man was fully dressed, his eyes glittered wildly, and in his buttoned shirt pocket were only two of the capsules that Cavendish had given him a few hours earlier.

Markov felt like a sailor returning home from a shipwreck. He was stiff-kneed with muscle strain, sticky with salt and sand, and sunburned painfully on his face and high forehead.

Every muscle ached. He had rowed the damnable outrigger canoe for hours while Jo sat grinning at him. If it hadn’t been for the brightness of the aurorae and the lights from the buildings on Kwajalein, Markov knew they would have drifted out to sea in the nighttime darkness and perished in the watery wilderness.

Now he clumped up the front stairs of his own little bungalow, crossed the uneven cement porch and pushed through the front door. It was not yet nine o’clock but it felt like four in the morning to Markov. Maria will be surprised to see me home so early, he thought.

She was not in the front room. He shrugged, and the movement under his shirt made him realize that his neck and shoulders were also sunburned.

With a sigh that looked forward to nothing more than collapsing face down on his bed, he opened the bedroom door.

Maria gaped at him, startled, shocked. The suitcase on her bed beside her was filled with strange electronic controls. A tiny glowing screen was flickering with a jagged trace of light, like an EKG.

But it was the expression on her face that stunned Markov. Guilt, anger, fear were all there. Her mouth was open but no sound issued from it. Her eyes stared at him and he could see all the way into her soul through them. She looked the way Lucifer must have looked when he realized that God had opened the pits of hell for him.