Ben Bova - Voyagers

“Please, Keith,” Jo’s voice pleaded.

He was halfway through the hatch when he looked back at the alien, resting silently for countless ages. And his mind filled with the bickering voices and flint-eyed faces of all the bureaucrats he had ever known. And McDermott. And Tuttle. He saw Dooley in his mind’s eyes, the agents and policemen and politicians who didn’t understand, who feared, who resisted, who would not accept reality even when it was thrust at them.

And he saw Cavendish, twisted and destroyed by them. And Schmidt, smashed into a pulp with his own hands.

“Shtoner, retrofire is in one minute. All is automatic. I cannot stay.”

“It’s all right, Nikolai,” he said quietly, sliding back inside the spacecraft’s transparent hull. His boots touched the springy floor at the alien’s feet.

“You get back to Earth, Nikolai. I’m staying here.”

“Keith!” Jo’s strangled scream.

“Don’t commit suicide,” Markov pleaded.

“It isn’t suicide,” Stoner said to them all. “You think I’m killing myself, but I’m not. I’m giving you an incentive, a double reason to come out as quickly as you can and recapture this treasure house. Because I’ll be here—frozen. Maybe I’ll be dead. But just maybe…maybe, I’ll be preserved, suspended, waiting to be brought back to life.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s a vacuum in here. No air. Temperature’s pretty close to absolute zero. It’s preserved the alien for god knows how many millennia. It ought to preserve me for a couple of years.”

He took a breath, realized their reply couldn’t reach him for many seconds, and went on, “It’s cold enough to flash-freeze me once I turn my suit heater off. I’ll ride with the alien for a few years. If you really care about me you’ll come out and get me before the two of us leave the solar system altogether.”

“Keith, you can’t…” Jo’s voice broke into sobs.

“I won’t be dead,” he told her gently. “I’ll be waiting for you, frozen, suspended between life and death, waiting for you to reach me and bring me back to life. Like the tale of Sleeping Beauty, only with our roles reversed.”

Markov’s voice was filled with grief. “She can’t speak, Keith. She wants to, but she can’t.”

“Kirill…Jo, listen to me. Make them work together. Create a global space effort, make the politicians do what needs to be done. Get the whole human race involved in this. We have the chance to reach the stars, all of us, to come out of the cocoon that we’ve been living in. Make them understand, make them look to the stars.”

The delay seemed to get longer with each exchange.

“How can we?” Markov’s voice pleaded. “We’re only ordinary people. We need you, Keith. You must return to lead us!”

“No, Kirill,” he said firmly. “You’ll have to lead them. It’s all up to you now. You and Jo.”

He waited for a reply.

“Ten seconds to retrofire,” Federenko’s glum voice tolled. “I can’t do it,” Markov answered at last. “You must come back. You must!”

“Too late, Kirill. It’s in your hands now. You’ve got to change them—all of them. Change the world for me, Kirill.”

Federenko broke in, “Farewell, Shtoner. You are a very brave and very foolish man. Good luck.”

“So long, Nikolai. Stay in training.”

“Keith!” Markov’s voice begged.

Stoner turned off the radio and watched the Soyuz. Its retrorockets puffed soundlessly, a brief flare against the dark, and the craft slid away, silently speeding off, dwindling until it was lost against the stars.

He turned back to the alien, swallowed hard against the rawness in his throat. He tried to rub his aching eyes, but his hand bumped against the sealed visor of his helmet. Shrugging, he went back to describing everything he could see.

And as he did so, he wondered, Could he be frozen too? Not dead? Can we revive him someday?

He knew that human medical science knew of no way to revive a frozen body, not without rupturing the cells and killing the person. That was for the future. With a grim smile, Stoner thought, Maybe I’ll shame them into making progress on that front, as well.

Jo sat stiffly in her chair before the communications console, the tears dried from her eyes, leaving no trace of emotion on her face except the smudges down her cheeks. The other technicians, row after row of them at their consoles, tried not to glance in her direction as they directed Federenko’s return flight toward the landing area at Karaganda, some six hundred kilometers to the east.

Markov sat beside her, blank-faced, his eyes a million miles away. Stoner’s voice was weaker as it rasped, static-streaked, from the console speaker. He was describing the spacecraft’s interior as emotionlessly as a lecturer detailing an archaeological specimen.

Markov seemed to shake himself into awareness. He reached into his pockets for a cigarette, muttering, “He’s made his decision. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

She looked at the Russian and saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

“He isn’t dead,” Jo said softly. “He won’t die…not unless we fail him. We can reach him, bring him back to us, bring him back to life.”

Glancing at the armed guards still surrounding them, Markov said, “We have much work to do, then.”

“Yes,” Jo agreed. “But we can do it. We can change the world.”

Markov nodded grimly. “I never thought I would become a crusader…an evangelist.”

“But you will be, won’t you?”

“For you,” he said softly. “For him.”

“No,” Jo corrected. “For yourself. For all of us. For Russia and the whole world.”

A slow smile spread across his lips. “You are just as bad as he is.”

“Worse,” Jo said. “I’m here on Earth. I can watch your progress.”

Markov got to his feet, drew himself up to his full height. “It will be an interesting battle. I’ve never been inside the Kremlin, you know.”

Jo smiled up at him. “We’ll win the battle, Kirill. I know we will.”

He nodded and put the cigarette to his lips.

Jo turned back to the console. Stoner was still patiently describing the contents of the spacecraft-tomb:

“…there doesn’t appear to be anything like a periodic table of the elements, or anything else that I can recognize. If there’s a Rosetta stone aboard this ark, it’ll be some piece of scientific information that the alien civilization has worked out similarly to the way we’ve worked it out…”

Suddenly Jo heard herself telling Markov, “I’ve got to talk with him. One more time. Before…before it’s too late.”

Markov nodded.

“Alone…just the two of us, with no one else on the frequency.”

He grinned down at her. “You expect Russians to allow you to speak in private?” With a tug at his beard, Markov said, “Well, if we’re going to change the system, we might as well begin here and now.”

The messages were coming in from all across the Earth now. Stoner hovered inside the alien crypt, utterly spent, feeling the eternal cold of infinity congealing around him, turning him to lead. He listened to the voices that called to him.

The President of the United States sent his thanks and prayers and an assurance that America would bend every effort to reach the spacecraft and bring him back to Earth.

The head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, speaking on behalf of the peoples of the U.S.S.R., praised Stoner for his dedication to science and his bravery and promised that the Soviet Union would participate in any program to reach the spacecraft.

His Holiness, the Pope, spoke personally to Stoner, promised that he would work unceasingly to save his body and would offer daily prayers for the preservation of his soul.