Ben Bova - Voyagers

“I’m going to be a guest of the Russian Government. We all will be. They wouldn’t dare do anything.”

“You’re being stubborn,” she said. “And stupid.”

“Kirill’s going to look out for me.”

She raised her hands to the heavens. “Some bodyguard. He can’t even paddle a canoe!”

Stoner laughed.

“Don’t do it, Keith. Please. Let the Russians send their own cosmonauts to rendezvous with the alien. Stay on the ground with the rest of us.”

“No,” he said.

“Keith, I’m scared for you! I’m frightened!”

“I know you are,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. I’m a heartless sonofabitch, okay? But this is more important to me than anything else. It’s my life . Can you understand that? More important to me than my kids, than you, than anything or anyone else. I’ve got to do it. I need to do it. I’d walk through fire to get to it.”

Jo said nothing. Her chin fell. She stared down at the sand at their feet.

“Am I wrong to feel this way? Am I some kind of monster?”

“Yes,” she answered softly. “You know you’re putting yourself in danger. But you turn your back on every human emotion, every human need. The only thing you want is to go out there and make this flight, even though you know they’re going to kill you over it.”

“What can I say?” he wondered. “So I’m a monster, after all.”

“Not a monster, Keith,” she replied. “A machine. An automated, self-programmed machine. I saw the way you battered Schmidt. He was an animal, but you were a machine. An inhuman, tireless, unemotional machine. Nothing can stand in your way. You drive over every obstacle, anything that gets in your way. Mac, Schmidt, the whole goddamned Navy…even your own children. None of us can hold you back.”

“That’s what you think of me?” Stoner’s voice was a strangled whisper. His insides felt cold and empty.

“That’s what you are, Keith,” Jo said, struggling to keep her own voice calm, untrembling.

For a long moment he said nothing. Then, “Okay. We’d better get back. I still have some packing to do.”

“Right. Me too.”

They walked in cold silence and Stoner left her at the entrance to the hotel. Jo watched him stride away, stiff with pride or anger or pain, and she realized that he did have emotions and vulnerabilities.

But he doesn’t care about me, she also realized. There’s no way that I can make him care about me.

Then she hurried inside, ran upstairs to her room and shut the door tightly behind her.

The Ilyushin jet transport was noisy and uncomfortable despite the fact that only two dozen passengers rode in its cavernous cabin.

Stoner sat up front, staring out a window at the endless expanse of steppe: nothing but grass, as far as the eye could see. Not a tree, not a town, not even a village. This must be what the American plains looked like before the farmers covered it with corn and wheat, he thought.

The plane rode smoothly enough at this high altitude. If only the seats weren’t so crammed together, Stoner compained silently. The only rough part of the flight had been when they’d crossed the Roof of the World, passing close enough to Everest to see its lofty snow-plumed peak, then across craggy Tibet and the wild Altai Mountains. Stoner imagined that far off in the distance he could see Afghanistan, where the hill tribesmen still fought for the independence, as they had fought against the armies of Alexander the Great.

Across the cramped aisle from Stoner, Professor Zworkin snored fitfully. The others were scattered around the long cabin. Jo had taken a seat in the rear, he knew.

His stomach rumbled. Food service aboard the flight was nonexistent. They had been fed once when the jet had landed at Vladivostok, and then once again, many hours later, at the refueling stop near Tashkent. Neither time had any of the passengers been allowed to step off the plane.

They had crossed the wild hill country where Kazakh horsemen still dressed in furs and conical felt hats and rode stubby ponies after their herds of sheep and goats. Now the grassland, the eternal steppe, with the city of Baikanur coming up and beyond it, the rocket-launching base of Tyuratam.

Stoner sensed someone leaning over him and turned in his seat. It was Markov, an odd little half-smile on his bearded face.

“We enter the country the same way our revered Lenin did, in 1917,” Markov said, nearly shouting to be heard over the thundering vibration of the jet engines.

“Lenin flew in?”

Markov lowered his lanky body into the seat next to Stoner’s. “No, the Germans sent him into Mother Russia in a sealed train. No stops, no one allowed on or off until it reached Petrograd. We fly in from the other direction, in a sealed airplane.”

Stoner tapped the window with a fingernail. “It’s a big country out there, your Mother Russia.”

“Oh, this isn’t Russia,” Markov corrected. “It’s Kazakhstan, a Federated Republic, part of the Soviet Union. But not Russia. These people are Asians…Mongols. Russia is another thousand kilometers to the west, on the other side of the Ural Mountains.”

“But it’s part of your country.”

Nodding, “Yes, just as Puerto Rico is part of the United States.”

Stoner looked out the window again. “Pretty damned big. And it looks untouched…raw.”

“Much of the Soviet Union is still virgin land,” Markov said. “It was Khrushchev’s dream to cultivate such lands, make them yield rich harvests.”

“What happened?”

Markov’s grin turned sardonic. “He was outvoted…while his back was turned.”

“Oh.”

“They allowed him a peaceful retirement, though. He died of natural causes. Very unusual for a Russian leader. A sign of our growing civilization.”

Stoner asked, “Are you laughing or crying, Kirill?”

With a shrug, Markov said, “Some of both, my friend. Some of both. I feel like a life-sentence prisoner returning to jail after a brief escape. It’s hateful, but it’s home.”

“I should’ve talked to you into staying at Kwajalein,” Stoner said, lowering his voice even though the drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything a few feet away.

“No, no,” Markov protested. “This is where I belong. This is where I should be.”

Stoner searched the Russian’s face. “You really believe that?”

Markov closed his ice-blue eyes and nodded gravely. “I have talked about it at some length with Maria. We are going to try to work things out between us. She will put in for a transfer to a…a less demanding job.” His boyish grin returned. “If I can make her more human, easier to live with, perhaps there is hope for the rest of the Russians as well.”

Stoner sensed there was much more going on in Markov’s marriage than the Russian was willing to talk about.

“In the meantime,” Markov went on, “all of us here will act as your bodyguard. You are part of us, and we are part of you. You will get to fly into space, never fear.”

“That’s all I ask,” Stoner said.

Markov’s face grew serious. “I know there has been talk about a Russian plot against you.”