Death Wave (9 page)

Looking truly distressed, Aditi asked, “What can we do?”

“I'm not sure,” Jordan replied. “But the first thing is to get out of this prison. We can't do anything while we're bottled up in here.”

 

BARCELONA

Castiglione flew back through the darkening night to Barcelona. It was nearly midnight when he finally arrived at Anita Halleck's villa in the hills on the outskirts of the city.

She was in her study, a high-ceilinged room paneled with old-fashioned bookshelves filled with old-fashioned paper books that had never been opened.

Halleck was sitting in a regal-looking armchair, a snifter of cognac in one beringed hand.

As soon as Castiglione stepped into the room she said, “I've just had a report from the head of the surveillance team. All the devices in their quarters went dead within seconds of their entering the rooms. Cameras, microphones, everything.”

“Too bad,” said Castiglione, heading for the bar built into the other side of the room. “It would have been interesting to watch that pretty little woman.”

Frowning, Halleck went on, “They replaced the devices while she and Kell were with you at dinner, and as soon as the two of them got back from the Officers' Club the devices went dead again.”

Castiglione reached for a decanter of port. “She must be disabling them,” he said.

“Obviously.”

Crossing the lush Persian carpet to sit in the wing chair facing Halleck, Castiglione shrugged nonchalantly. “We suspected she had certain … eh, capabilities. Now she's proven it.”

Frostily, Halleck demanded, “What other
capabilities
might she have?”

“Faster-than-light communications.”

“Exactly. We have to get that from her.”

Castiglione took a sip of port, then said, “Perhaps she'll tell us about it voluntarily.”

“And if she refuses?”

He waggled his free hand in the air. “There are ways.”

“Do you think they'd work on her? An alien?”

“They'd work on Kell. She loves him, she doesn't want to see him hurt.”

Halleck stared at him for a few moments. Then, “I wonder.”

“It would be interesting to find out,” said Castiglione.

“Must your mind always be in the gutter, Rudy?”

He smiled thinly. “You never seemed to mind it before.”

Her eyes narrowing, Halleck said, “Suppose we make a deal with Kell. We offer to build the starships he wants, in return for her telling us how to build a faster-than-light communications system.”

Castiglione's smile widened. “And once you have that knowledge, you don't have to go through with building the ships.”

“We can run into unexpected difficulties with the program,” Halleck agreed. “After all, building half a dozen starships is no small project.”

“Kell would scream his head off to the news media. He'd make a powerful stink about your going back on your word.”

“Not if he's safely contained. Someplace where he can't reach the media. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

Castiglione pursed his lips momentarily, then said, “I don't think that airbase is tight enough to contain him.”

“It's under a full security guard, isn't it?”

“Yes, but they're all Spanish Air Force people. I'd feel better if we had him stored away somewhere under our own security.”

Halleck nodded slowly. “Somewhere off-Earth, perhaps?”

“Someplace where they'd be totally dependent on us. Even for the air they breathe.”

*   *   *

Once they were in bed together, with all the lights out, Jordan asked Aditi, “Are you certain that all the cameras and microphones have been disabled?”

“Why? What do you have in mind?” In the darkness, he could hear the impish tone in her voice.

“Can you contact Adri?”

More soberly Aditi replied, “Oh. Yes, of course.”

“I think he can help us to get out of this prison.”

“From eight light-years away?”

“I think so.”

It took more than an hour, but at last Adri's aged, seamed face appeared in the bedroom's three-dimensional viewer, casting a ghostly light through the room.

“Friend Jordan,” Adri said in his soft whispery voice. “And Aditi, my dearest.”

As usual, Adri was wearing a floor-length robe. This time it was a pale yellow, embellished with twining traceries. He appeared to be standing in a moonlit garden. Jordan remembered that New Earth had no moon; the pale light must be coming from the dwarf star companion of Sirius, he realized.

Knowing that a two-way conversation was impossible with a time lag of more than an hour, Jordan began, “Adri, we need your help. The people controlling Earth's government are indifferent to the death wave. They feel a danger that's two thousand years away isn't real; at least, it's not close enough to rouse them to action.

“What's worse, they probably won't move to help the other intelligent species who are in danger from the death wave…”

On and on Jordan spoke, explaining in detail what he and Aditi had experienced since returning to Earth. His throat grew hoarse, and Aditi slipped out of bed to get him a glass of water.

“I'll wait for your reply,” Jordan croaked. While I try to recover, he added silently. I haven't spoken nonstop for this long since I tried to head off the war brewing between Kenya and South Africa, ages ago.

He sipped at the water while Aditi sat on the edge of the bed, watching him caringly.

“You've given Adri a lot to think about,” she said.

Jordan smiled wanly. “I hope he can do what I'm going to ask him to do.”

At last Adri's three-dimensional image spoke. “Friend Jordan, your news troubles me. I confess that I expected better from your people. Please tell me how I can help you.”

Jordan did precisely that.

 

NEW YORK CITY

Vera Griffin stood by the one narrow window of the Otero Network's control center and watched the sun coming up over the skyscrapers that lined Manhattan's East Side.

Smiling at the sight, she thought idly, The town so big they named it twice: New York, New York.

It was Friday morning, the end of the workweek and the last time she'd have to work the graveyard shift. On Monday she was going to start in her new position. After four years of dedicated drudgery in the control center, she would be a producer at last, with an office of her own. Producer of a dinky little human-interest segment of the network's evening news, it was true, and her office would be nothing more than a cubicle, but it was her first step up the ladder that led to the executive suite and real, substantive success.

I'll have to move to Boston, she knew, to corporate headquarters. All right, I'll make the move. Beantown or Podunk, I'll move to where my career takes me. But still she gazed fondly at the wall of towers that rose to the sky.

She was a diminutive woman, slim and doll-like, with lank brown hair she had once thought of as mousy but now was attractively coifed and highlighted with touches of gold. Even for the graveyard shift she dressed stylishly: no dungarees and sweatshirts for her, you never knew when one of the corporate suits might pop into the control center. It was rare but it happened; once Carlos Otero himself had appeared unexpectedly in the studio. When he did Vera looked like an up-and-coming young future executive. Determined. Knowledgeable. Charming.

“Hey Vera, you better look at this.”

She turned at the sound of the man's voice. One of the graveyard crew, assigned to monitoring the four dozen screens that showed the network's news feeds from around the world.

Vera's eyes went wide. Every screen was showing the same thing! Some middle-aged guy with silver hair and a trim mustache, speaking earnestly as he stared into the camera. She recognized the man as Jordan Kell, the star traveler who had led the mission to New Earth and returned with an alien wife.

She hurried to her workstation while the man was saying, “You may remember that I returned three weeks ago from our expedition to New Earth, the planet orbiting the star Sirius.”

“What's going on?” she demanded as she slid into her chair.

“He's on every friggin' feed,” her assistant said. “Even the other networks. The private chatter channels, too!”

“He's going out on the air?”

Her assistant pointed to the monitor that showed what the network was broadcasting. Jordan Kell was there, too.

“Jesus!” she gulped. “Pull him off! Take him down!”

Other crew people were shouting frantically into the voice-activating pin mikes that controlled their consoles. None of their screens changed in the slightest. Some crew people were even tapping at their antiquated keyboards. Pounding on them. Nothing changed—Jordan Kell kept speaking intently, his face utterly serious.

“I've taken this extraordinary step of intervening on your telecasts because we face an extraordinary challenge. The World Council wants to ignore this challenge, but I feel that you—the people of Earth—should know about it, understand it, and decide what you want to do about it.”

Phones started jangling. Vera knew who was calling. The suits, the executives who've had their morning coffees interrupted by this … this … invader.

“The solar system is going to be flooded by a lethal wave of gamma radiation,” Jordan Kell was saying. “It will kill all life on Earth and every other part of the solar system, unless we act to protect ourselves.”

Her assistant shoved a phone receiver in front of her nose. “It's the chief of programming!” he yelped, his face flushed.

Vera took the phone.

“What the hell's going on down there?” her boss fairly screamed. “Our regular netcasts are off the air, for chrissake!”

“It's some nut case,” Vera answered. “He's somehow taken control of all our channels.”

“Get him off the air! Now!”

“We're trying.”

“Get it done!”

“Yessir.”

But half an hour later, Vera had to face the fact that no matter what she tried, Jordan Kell remained on the air. Every channel. It was scant consolation that he was on the competition's channels, as well.

*   *   *

It was almost lunchtime in Barcelona when one of her aides tiptoed into her conference room and stood nervously at Anita Halleck's elbow.

Halleck was in the midst of a sensitive meeting with representatives of the Latin American Alliance, a power bloc that controlled enough seats on the World Council to force a vote of confidence upon her.

Halleck ignored the aide's fidgeting as long as she could, then finally asked her visitors to forgive the interruption.

Before she could ask the man why he dared break into her meeting, he leaned over and whispered into her ear, “It's Jordan Kell. He's on every video broadcast all around the world!”

“What?”

“He's speaking about the death wave.”

Halleck shot to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said to the startled men and women seated around the conference table. “Something has come up.”

Leaving the Latin Americans gaping at her, Halleck followed her aide back to her private office. There, in the three-dimensional viewer on the wall opposite her desk, sat Jordan Kell, his face grave, his voice solemn.

“… unless we decide to help them, these intelligent creatures will be wiped out by the death wave, driven into extinction because we failed to act.”

“Get Rudy Castiglione in here,” she snapped. Her aide bolted for the door.

Kell appeared to be in a bare-walled sitting room, probably in that air base at Tarragona, Halleck thought. Yet somehow he was speaking on the World Council's private communications channel. From the way he was speaking, Halleck realized that he must be on all the public channels, as well.

She called to her phone for her chief of communications. It took a few seconds, but the woman's harried face finally appeared on the phone screen.

Pushing a disheveled lock of hair from her eyes, the comm chief didn't wait for Halleck's obvious question.

“He's on every channel!” she said, her voice close to panic.

“How can that be?” Halleck demanded.

“I don't know! I've got my entire staff trying to track it down. The phones are jammed; calls from video broadcasters, private chat networks, all across the world!”

Through it all, Kell still appeared on her viewer, speaking calmly, evenly. “This is a crisis of interstellar proportions. Earth and all the human settlements throughout the solar system are in danger. So are other worlds, other planetary systems scattered among the stars where intelligent species exist. If we don't act, those creatures will die. If we don't act, the human race will die.”

Halleck could hear her pulse thundering in her ears. The anger that seethed through her, though, slowly faded as she marveled at what this man Kell was accomplishing. With the help of his alien wife. Every broadcast channel on the planet! she marveled. I've got to get control of this technology. Which means I've got to get Kell under my control. Him, and his alien woman.

 

NASHVILLE

Hamilton Cree flew to Nashville on his three-day weekend holiday to see his brothers for the first time since Christmas.

The family reunion took place at Jeff's home, a rambling single-story ranch-type house sitting close to the massive levee that kept the Cumberland River within its banks. Farther south and west the lower Mississippi had been engulfed in what people now called the Sea of Mexico. Nashville had barely saved itself from being drowned, like New Orleans and Baton Rouge and so many other cities had been.

Hamilton was the only unmarried man of the four brothers, and the house rang with the shrieks and laughter of his six nieces and nephews.

Happily stuffed with the dinner his sisters-in-law had made, and the beer that brother Hank had brought with him from his distributorship, Hamilton sat in relaxed comfort in Jeff's man cave: territory forbidden to wives and children.