Ben Bova - Voyagers

“Kirill, I never thought that you or anyone among us…”

“Not to worry,” he said, raising a hand to silence Stoner. “I will be in communication with Academician Bulacheff the instant we land at Tyuratam. This project will go through without interference, I promise you.”

“Okay,” Stoner said. “Fine.”

“We are not pawns in some international power game,” Markov muttered darkly. “The government will treat us—all of us—with some respect.”

“Do you really think you can change the system that much, Kirill?”

Shaking his head slightly, Markov said, “It isn’t necessary to change the system, as much as it is to get the bureaucrats to return to the system, to use it honestly and fairly. The Russian people are a good, hard-working people. They have suffered much, endured much. We must return to the true principles of Marx and Lenin. We must return to the road that leads inevitably to a truly just and happy society.”

“That’s a big job,” Stoner said.

“Yes, but I have help,” Markov said. “Our alien is going to help me.”

“How?”

With an absentminded tug at his beard, Markov said, “Look at what the alien has already accomplished. Not merely for me, but for you as well. America and Russia are co-operating—in a limited way, to be sure, but co-operating in the midst of confrontations on almost every other front.”

Stoner countered, “Then why wouldn’t they let us off this airplane? They’re co-operating so well that they’re afraid we’d steal something if we set foot on their ground.”

“Do you realize how great a strain it is on our national paranoia to allow Americans to come to our premier rocket base? And two Chinese scientists?”

“I suppose so, but…”

“Our alien visitor has already forced all the governments of the world to change their habits of thought.”

“An inch,” said Stoner.

“Perhaps only a centimeter,” Markov granted, “but still it is a change. They can never think again of our world as the whole universe. They are being forced to work together to find out who this alien visitor is. Never again can we think of other human beings, other human nations or races, as being truly alien. Our visitor from space is forcing us to accept the truth that all humans are brothers.”

“Jesus Christ,” Stoner muttered. “Scratch a Russian and he bleeds philosophy.”

“Yes,” said Markov. “And pious philosophy, at that. But mark my words, dear friend. This alien will bring us all closer together.”

“I hope you’re right, Kirill.”

“It has already done so! It has made friends of us, hasn’t it?”

Stoner nodded.

“It has been a good friendship, Keith.” Markov’s eyes got watery. “I am proud to have you for a friend, Keith Stoner. You are a good man. If necessary, I would lay down my life for you.”

For several moments, Stoner didn’t know what to say. “Hey, Kirill, I feel the same way about you. But this isn’t the end of our friendship, it’s only the beginning.”

“I hope so.” Markov sighed. “But once we land, neither my life nor yours will be completely under our own control. Events will catch us up and carry us on their shoulders. And, certainly, I may never get the chance to leave Russia again, to see you or any other foreigners.”

The realization caught Stoner by surprise. He heard himself answer, “And I might never come back from the rendezvous mission.”

“Ah,” Markov said, “I hadn’t even thought about that possibility.”

Stoner took a deep breath.

“There is one thing I can promise you, though,” Markov said before Stoner could think of anything.

“What’s that?”

“You will get to go on the rendezvous mission. No one will stop you from going. That I promise.”

Stoner nodded and smiled and told himself, He means what he’s saying, but he’s got no way of keeping that promise.

Markov nodded back, eyes misting again, and wordlessly got up to head back to his own seat.

Turning back to the window to watch the endless empty steppe, Stoner soon drifted off to sleep. He was jolted out of the doze by the plane’s sudden lurching and the loud banging noise of the landing gear being lowered. The plane shuddered and banked hard over until the grassy ground seemed to tilt upward to meet them.

It sounded as if a gale was blowing through the cabin. As he pulled his seat belt tighter, Stoner saw that Zworkin, across the aisle, was very much awake now and clutching the arms of his chair with white-knuckled terror.

Then the plane straightened out, lurching and bumping through the early evening twilight as the pilot lined it up for the final approach to the airfield. Stoner looked out the window and his jaw dropped open.

Tyuratam.

It was like the skyline of Manhattan, except that these were not buildings, but gantry towers. Steel spiderworks for holding and launching rockets. Miles of them! Stoner saw, gaping. One after another, a whole city full of rocket-launching towers. It made Cape Canaveral look like a flimsy suburban development, modest in scale and temporary in endurance. This was built to last. Like Pittsburgh, like Gary, like the acres upon acres of factories in major industrial centers, Tyuratam was a solid, ongoing, workaday complex of giant buildings, vast machines, hardworking people.

Their business was launching rockets Their industry was astronautics. The place was a port, like fabled Basra of the Arabian Nights , like modern Marseille or New York or Shanghai. Ships sailed out of this port on long, bellowing tongues of flame, heading for destinations in space, bringing back new riches of knowledge.

And someday, Stoner knew, they’ll bring back energy, and raw materials, and they’ll start building factories up there in orbit.

But for now they probed the uncharted seas of space for knowledge, for safe harbors where satellites could orbit and relay information back to Earth.

The plane edged lower. Stoner could see spotlights blooming around one launch pad, where a tall silvery rocket stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry tower.

That’s a Soyuz launcher, he realized. That’s the bird I’m going to fly on.

He did not notice, far off on the other side of the vast complex of towers and rockets, two other boosters standing side by side. They were painted a dull military olive-gray, and were topped by blunt-nosed warheads of megaton death.

Religion

CALMING THE FEARS OF GEHENNA

Rudolfo Cardinal Benedetto, his brown eyes bright and alert despite the man-killing schedule he’s been keeping, looked up at the glowing sky and actually smiled.

“Now we know that we are not God’s only creatures,” he said in the soft accent of his native Lombardy. “Now, if God grants it, we shall communicate with our visitor.”

Cardinal Benedetto, the Vatican Secretary of State, has been holding the line against the more conservative members of the Curia ever since the news of the approaching alien burst upon the stunned world, in April. The papal Secretary spearheaded his Pope’s position that the alien spacecraft presents “no spiritual threat” to the souls of Roman Catholics. (See “The Pope Speaks Out,” page 22.)

Rumors have reached Rome that millions of Catholics around the world are panicked at the thought of an “anti-Christ” arriving from outer space. Reports have been heard of nightly rituals ranging from Catholic Masses to grisly pagan rites. From the Third World, tales of human sacrifices have been reported, and even in American cities church attendance has skyrocketed since the alien’s presence was announced….

Stoner sat hunched over the gray sheet of paper, ballpoint pen hesitating in midair. So far he had written: