Ben Bova - Voyagers

Mr. Douglas Stoner

28 Rainbow Way

Palo Alto, CA 94302

Dear Son:

How are you? If you’ve been following the news at all, I guess you know by now that I’m in Russia, about to take off on a space mission to meet the alien spacecraft—if that’s possible. The Russians have made us very comfortable here. They put us up in a kind of barracks—sort of like a dormitory. We each have a small room to ourselves. Not that I spend much time in it.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working very hard with the Russian cosmonauts and launch team. You should have seen them trying to fit me into one of their pressure suits! I’m taller and slimmer than most of the cosmonauts and they had to do some fast custom tailoring to fit me. And their medical people have been all over me; you might think I was the alien the way they’ve been checking me out!

Everyone here has been very good to us although we are restricted to this barracks building and the few other buildings where we do our work. The Russians don’t like us roaming around. I suppose we would be equally careful with foreign visitors at Kennedy SFC in Florida.

There are eleven other foreign scientists here, in addition to...

He put the pen down. What difference does that make? he asked himself. Doug wouldn’t be interested in it.

Stoner pushed his chair back and stretched his arms over his head.

What the hell is Doug interested in? he wondered. He realized that he didn’t know his own son; the boy was a stranger to him. And his younger daughter he knew even less.

With a snort of self-disgust he slammed the pen down on the wooden desk, got up and headed for the door. He walked slowly down the narrow hallway. All the other doors were closed. It was not late; dinner had ended less than an hour earlier.

But tomorrow’s the big day, Stoner told himself. The final countdown. The launch.

Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. His previous launches, in America, had been livelier, busier. There were constant meetings, press conferences, get-togethers even late at night, news photographers poking their cameras at you.

Not here, he realized. No reporters. No photographers.

He went downstairs to the common room, where they ate their meals. One of the Chinese physicists was sitting in the leather chair in the corner, under the wall lamp, reading a book in Russian. Stoner nodded to him and the Chinese smiled back politely. His interpreter was gone and they could not converse.

Stoner looked over the round table in the middle of the room, scanned the mostly empty bookshelves, prowled restlessly toward the door of the kitchen and pushed it open.

Markov was bending over in front of the open refrigerator, peering into it.

“You had two helpings of dessert,” Stoner said.

Markov straightened up. “So? Spying on me? Well, I can’t help it. When I’m nervous, I eat. I must keep up my blood sugar, you know.”

“It was damned good baklava,” Stoner admitted. “At least the cooking here is first-rate.”

“Do you want some? That is, if there’s any left?”

“No.” Stoner shook his head. “When I’m nervous I can’t eat.”

Markov looked at him. “You, nervous? You look so calm, so relaxed.”

“I’ve got the jumps inside.”

With a disappointed sigh Markov closed the refrigerator. “It’s all gone,” he said. “Strange, I could have sworn there was some left.”

“Like Captain Queeg’s strawberries,” Stoner said.

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

They drifted back into the common room. The Chinese physicist had left, but one of the Russians had taken the leather chair and turned on the radio on the bookshelf. Classical piano music filled the room.

“Is that Tchaikovsky?” Stoner asked.

Markov gave him a stern professorial glance. “That,” he said firmly, “is Beethoven. The ‘Pathétique Sonata.’”

Stoner refused to be cowed. “Tchaikovsky wrote a Pathétique too, didn’t he?”

“A symphony. It requires at least a hundred musicians and almost an hour’s time. Really, Keith, for a civilized man…”

“I just thought a Russian station would play only Russian composers.”

Markov began to reply, then realized that his leg was being pulled. He laughed.

“Come on,” Stoner said. “Let’s see if we can find some coffee.”

“Aren’t you supposed to refrain from stimulants tonight?” Markov asked. “I thought the medical…”

Stoner raised a finger to silence him. “That muscular fellow sitting in the corner is one of your medical team,” he said in a pleasant lighthearted tone. The Russian paid no attention to them. “He’s going to stick a needle in me the size of the Alaska Pipeline, right at eleven o’clock. But until then, I’ll eat and drink what I want.”

“I have vodka in my room,” Markov said.

“That’s going too far. Coffee won’t blur me tomorrow. Vodka could.”

They went back into the kitchen and Stoner started a pot of coffee brewing. The strains of Beethoven filtered through the kitchen door.

“I have been thinking,” Markov said as he sat at the kitchen table, chin in hand, “about a British philosopher—Haldane.”

“J. B. S. Haldane? He was a biologist, wasn’t he?”

“A geneticist, I believe. And a Marxist. He was a member of the British Communist Party in the nineteen-thirties.”

“So?”

“He once said, ‘The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine.’ ”

Stoner frowned, turned to the coffeepot perking on the stove, then looked back at Markov.

“Don’t you see what it means?” the Russian asked. “You’re going to risk your life tomorrow and fly off to this alien spacecraft. But suppose, when you reach it…”

“ If we reach it,” Stoner heard himself mutter. It surprised him.

“If and when you reach it,” Markov granted, “suppose it’s something beyond human comprehension? Suppose you can’t make head or tail of it?”

Stoner took a potholder and pulled the coffeepot off the stove. He stepped over the table and poured coffee into the two strangely delicate china cups that seemed to be the only kind the kitchen stocked. Beethoven’s Pathétique flowed into its second movement.

“Do you hear that?” Stoner asked, gesturing with the steaming coffeepot.

“The music? Yes, of course.”

“A human being created that. A human mind. Other human minds have played it, recorded it, broadcast it over the air so that we can hear it. We’re listening to the thoughts of a German musician who’s been dead for more than a century and a half.”

“What has that to do with the alien?” Markov asked.

“An alien mind built that spacecraft…”

“A mind we may not be able to comprehend,” said the Russian.

“But that spacecraft follows the same laws of physics that we do comprehend. It moves through space just like any spacecraft that we ourselves have built.”

“And sets off the Northern Lights all around the planet.”

“Using electromagnetic techniques that we don’t understand—yet. But we’ll learn. We have the ability to understand.”

“I wonder if we do.”

Stoner put the coffeepot down on the table.

“Don’t you see, Kirill? We do. We do ! Why do you think I want to go out there? So I can be overawed by something I can’t fathom? So I can worship the goddamned aliens? Hell no! I want to see, to learn, to understand .”

“And if you can’t? If it’s beyond comprehension?”

Stoner shook his head stubbornly. “There is nothing in the universe that we can’t understand—given time enough to study it.”

“That is your belief.”