Ben Bova - Voyagers

“Yes,” she answered automatically. “Of course.”

Taking her by the shoulders, Markov said in a near whisper, “Maria, he is my friend. I don’t want any harm to come to him.”

“There’s nothing I can do to harm him,” she said.

“But you can help him.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Is he still in danger, Maria?”

She pulled away from him.

But he grabbed her again, harder. “Maria! If there’s any chance at all for us to live together, you must be honest with me. Is he still in danger?”

“It’s not in our hands, Kirill,” she said, trying to avoid his eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“About what?” His voice was becoming frantic.

“I don’t know!” she said, pleading. “The decisions that are being made—Kirill, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it! It doesn’t concern us!”

“Yes, it does!” His voice was so intense it cut through her. “If you let them kill Stoner you’re also letting them kill us.”

“Kir, I can’t…”

“What are they going to do?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.”

“But they are going to do something?”

“There are…factions, at the very highest levels of authority.”

“You must find out what they plan to do, Maria. Before we let him get into that rocket!”

“It won’t be the rocket,” she said. “That much I know. They don’t want the rocket launch to fail, not in front of worldwide television coverage.”

“Then what?”

“How can I know, Kir? If I even hinted at trying to find out, it could mean…I can’t do it, Kir. I can’t.”

He circled his arms around her and held her close. Instead of bellowing, his voice became gentle, almost passionate. “You must, Maria. It’s the only hope for us, for all of us. You must find out what they plan to do to him. And quickly.”

Their voices woke Jo. She couldn’t make out words through the thin walls separating the second-floor rooms, but she could tell from the rhythms of the voices that it was Russian being spoken. Heatedly.

Jo showered and dressed quickly. It wasn’t until she stood in front of the foggy mirror over her sink to put on lipstick that she realized her hands were trembling.

She was the first downstairs in the common room. The cook and her helper—both pale-skinned Russians, wives of technicians—had already set the table for breakfast and filled the kitchen with the steamy aroma of hot cereal, eggs, ham and the thin, limp local equivalent of crepes.

Markov came downstairs, looking as tense as a bow-string pulled taut, followed by his dumpy, sour-faced wife. Jo realized it was their voices that had awakened her. In a few minutes the two Chinese scientists came down, then Zworkin and two of his aides. No one spoke much. Anxiety crackled through the air like high-voltage electricity.

Jo couldn’t eat. She sipped at a cup of coffee as the team from the launch complex pulled up outside in their van. A half-dozen technicians in white coveralls clumped into the common room, spoke a few words in Russian with Zworkin, then headed upstairs.

Jo followed after them. As she climbed the stairs she realized that Markov was just behind her.

“My hands are shaking,” she said to him.

“Yes,” he replied. Nothing more.

Stoner was out in the hallway, also in coveralls that the Russians had furnished. The technical team surrounded him like a phalanx of bodyguards, like an escort of white-robed priests.

“I’m to go with him,” Markov muttered, pushing his way past Jo.

“Kirill!” Stoner said with a happy grin. “Good morning. Will you kindly tell these guys that I’m ready to go? What’re we standing around here for? Let’s get the show on the road.”

Markov spoke in Russian and the technicians laughed and nodded to one another. They started for the stairs. Jo started to move aside for them, then saw that Zworkin and all the others had clustered at the bottom of the steps, craning their necks upward.

The farewell committee, she thought.

Stoner stopped as he came next to her. “So long, kid. Thanks for everything.”

She froze, unable to move her hands, pinned against the wall by the crowd of technicians.

“Good luck, Keith,” she managed to whisper.

He leaned over, kissed her lightly. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.

Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs in his flight boots, Markov slightly ahead of him, the technicians following behind.

Jo stood there, suddenly alone in the upstairs hallway, and thought:

At least he’s on his way. They won’t try anything now. If they did, it would kill the cosmonaut who’s going up with him.

It was nearly midnight in Washington, but the Oval Office was brightly lit and filled with the President’s advisers.

“How long before lift-off?” asked the press secretary.

“Less than two hours now,” the science adviser answered. She was sitting rigidly upright on one of the straight-backed chairs that had been brought in from the secretary’s office.

“When do we start praying?” cracked Senator Jay. He was working on his third scotch of the evening.

“I started an hour ago,” the President said from behind his desk.

Their eyes were all riveted on the TV screen built into the wall of the Oval Office. It displayed the picture being relayed out of Tyuratam without the interruptions of the networks’ commercial coverage. The President could, at the touch of a button on his desk, switch on commentary from any network he chose, or from the NASA analysts who were monitoring the broadcast from the basement offices under the West Wing. At the moment, the CBS News commentary was being shown, printed on a smaller screen beneath the big picture. The President kept the sound off.

Walden C. Vincennes, tanned and handsome in his flowing, leonine gray hair, somehow had managed to get the old Kennedy rocker for himself and place it to the right of the President’s desk.

“If they pull this off, Mr. President,” he said, his rich baritone cutting through the other conversations buzzing around the room, “your stock will go up incredibly high.”

“Perhaps,” said the President. “We’ll see.”

The press secretary focused his attention on the two of them, even though he was sitting all the way across the room, wedged into the couch between Senator Jay and General Hofstader.

Vincennes smiled like a movie star. “You know, Mr. President, if all this goes well, the people might demand that you reconsider your decision not to run again.”

The President shook his head. “I doubt it.”

“There could be a draft at the convention.”

“No.”

“I’ve heard…talk.”

It seemed to take an effort for the President to pull his eyes from the TV screen. “Walden, if we make contact with this alien spaceship, and if it’s not hostile, and if there’s a lot to be gained from the contact—don’t you think I’ll have my hands full, between now and November? How could I campaign for re-election and do justice to all that?”

Vincennes put on a thoughtful look. His smile faded by degrees, but the press secretary thought his eyes looked even happier than they had when he’d been smiling.

“I suppose you’re right,” Vincennes said.

“And if this doesn’t go well,” the President went on, “if that young man dies or the alien turns out to be hostile or some form of monster…then I’m finished anyway.”

“That’s true. But I’m sure it will all go well.”

The press secretary laughed to himself. Vincennes is angling for the Chief’s endorsement as the party’s candidate. I’ll be damned! He really wants to run for it! Then he thought, more seriously, I ought to have a long talk with him about it. He’ll need an experienced staff, after all.