Ben Bova - Voyagers

They moaned. They gasped. They sobbed. Willie himself, watching the display from the platform, could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

Don’t drag it out too long, he reminded himself. Catch them right at the peak…

In that unnatural silence Willie heard a strange whining drone, the whicker-whicker-whicker of helicopter rotors. Turning toward the sound, he saw the blinking running lights of a low-flying chopper as it made a pass over the stadium.

“It’s them!” somebody screamed.

“They’re here!”

“They’ve come! They’ve come!”

The vast animal of the crowd surged and panicked. Before Willie understood what was happening, a human wave broke across the stadium. People shrieked and screamed and ran.

“No, wait!” Willie shouted into the microphone. “It’s nothing to be afraid of…”

But the animal was mindless with terror. People were being trampled at the jammed exits. Others jumped from ledges to get away. The wave of terrified beasts broke across the wooden platform, swarmed over it; the platform swayed, sagged, groaned and collapsed into a sea of screaming, trampling, bloody panic.

And beneath it all, among the splintered planks and thundering, stampeding feet, Willie Wilson lay inert as maddened people tripped over his prostrate form and went down on top of him.

WILSON, 126 OTHERS KILLED IN PANIC

ANAHEIM: Rev. Willie Wilson was among 127 persons killed last night when panic swept the overcrowded Anaheim Stadium. More than 3,000 were injured.

Rev. Wilson, the Urban Evangelist, was the featured speaker in the mammoth outdoor revival rally. Police said that the stadium was filled well beyond legal capacity for the meeting that brought together many of the nation’s leading fundamentalists, UFOlogists, researchers in the occult and religionists of more orthodox faiths.

The panic was apparently triggered, according to police, when a television camera helicopter swooped low over the stadium, causing some to believe that an alien UFO was about to land. The huge crowd panicked and thousands were trampled in the rush for the exits.

Rev. Wilson, who repeatedly associated the aurorae caused by the alien spacecraft now approaching the Earth with a message from God, was born…

Markov sat in moody silence on the darkened porch of the bungalow. A mosquito whined near his ear but he paid no attention to it.

Go ahead and drink my blood, he said silently. You won’t be the only one.

The front door creaked slightly as Maria opened it. She came out and sat on the other end of the wicker couch, as far from Markov as she could get.

“Well?” he asked.

For several seconds she made no reply. Then she said flatly, “I have sent my report to Moscow. I told them that Cavendish committed suicide and I then destroyed the apparatus to avoid any possibility that the Americans might discover it.”

“Did you tell them that you wish to retire from the service?”

“Certainly not!”

“Did you ask for a transfer to a branch that doesn’t get involved in these hideous things?”

“Kir,” she said, “I’ve told you a thousand times, our branch normally does not deal with undercover agents and interrogations. It’s only this…this alien thing that’s forced us into this situation.”

“I want you out of the KGB, Maria Kirtchatovska,” Markov said. “I want you to be the wife of a university professor and nothing more.”

She turned toward him and in the dim light from the window he could see the stubborn expression on her face. “You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? I sit home and collect a retirement pension while you spend each night with a different college girl. A wonderful life! For you.”

“Do you believe that torturing people and killing them is such a good way to live?”

“I never did anything like that!”

He slapped his hands against his thighs and got to his feet. “Maria, you are lying. Lying to me, and even lying to yourself. If you can live with what you’ve been doing, so be it. But I can’t live with it. I cannot live with it!”

“You’ve been living with it for nearly twenty years,” she countered.

Looking down at her, he said, “Yes, I’ve been keeping my eyes closed for twenty years. Now they are open.”

“What do you want of me?” Maria asked. Her voice was different, no longer hard and stubborn, almost openly pleading.

“I told you what I want.”

“I can’t retire,” she said. “They’d never allow it. Don’t you realize what’s happening these days? With the General Secretary ailing and the Presidium going through earthquakes?”

“The only other thing I can do is divorce you,” Markov said.

“Divorce? After all these years?”

“I can’t live with what you’re doing,” he said. “I know you’re trying to prevent Stoner from getting to fly on the rendezvous mission. The man is my friend, Maria. If you harm him, you put yourself against me.”

She sighed heavily. “Kir, you’re going to end up teaching school in some prison town in the Gulag.”

Markov nodded in the darkness. Glancing out at the shimmering sky, he said slowly, so softly that he could barely hear it himself, “There is one other possibility.”

“What other possibility?”

“I could stay with the Americans…ask for asylum.”

He heard her gasp with shock. “Defect? Leave Russia forever? Turn your back on your own people, your own nation?”

“I don’t want to do that, but…”

“They’d kill you, Kirill Vasilovsk.” Maria’s voice was metal-hard, as matter-of-fact as an automatic pistol. “I’d kill you myself before I’d let you do that to us.”

When Stoner looked up from the work on his desk he saw that out beyond his window it was night. Even through the panes, though, the shimmering, beckoning lights made the sky dance.

He glanced at his wristwatch, then on impulse reached for the phone. It took a few minutes to track her down through the island’s central switchboard, but finally he heard Jo’s voice:

“Hello?”

“It’s Keith Stoner, Jo.”

“Oh. Hello, Keith.”

Suddenly he felt schoolboy awkward. “Um…have you had your dinner yet?”

“An hour ago.”

“Oh.”

“Are you still at your office?”

“Yeah. There’s a lot to do…”

“And you haven’t had anything to eat since lunch?”

“No.”

She said, “Well, you’d better get down to Pete’s place. He’s the only one who stays open after nine. I’ll meet you there.”

“But you said you’ve already eaten.”

She hesitated only a second. “I’ll have some dessert with you. Okay?”

“Sure. Fine.”

An hour later, as they left the seedy restaurant, Jo said:

“Remind me to stick to Jell-O next time.”

“The cake was no good?” he asked.

“It must have been left here by the Japs after World War Two, it was so stale.”

He laughed.

Automatically they walked across the empty street, between buildings, heading for the beach. They walked side by side, not touching, but close enough for Stoner to feel the warmth of her. Jo was wearing a dress, a light sleeveless flowered frock that caught the warm, scented sea breeze.

“Keith…answer a question for me?”

“If I can,” he said.

“Why is this rendezvous mission so important to you? I mean, why do you have to make the flight?”

He looked down at her. “Christ, Jo, you ought to understand that. You’d feel the same way, wouldn’t you?”

“I do feel the same way,” she said earnestly. “But I don’t understand why. What’s driving us? Why do you have to go? Why do I want to go?”