Voyagers I (27 page)

The Ilyushin jet transport was noisy and uncomfortable despite the fact that only two dozen passengers rode in its cavernous cabin.

Stoner sat up front, staring out a window at the endless expanse of steppe: nothing but grass, as far as the eye could see. Not a tree, not a town, not even a village. This must be what the American plains looked like before the farmers covered it with corn and wheat, he thought.

The plane rode smoothly enough at this high altitude. If only the seats weren’t so crammed together, Stoner compained silently. The only rough part of the flight had been when they’d crossed the Roof of the World, passing close enough to Everest to see its lofty snow-plumed peak, then across craggy Tibet and the wild Altai Mountains. Stoner imagined that far off in the distance he could see Afghanistan, where the hill tribesmen still fought for the independence, as they had fought against the armies of Alexander the Great.

Across the cramped aisle from Stoner, Professor Zworkin snored fitfully. The others were scattered around the long cabin. Jo had taken a seat in the rear, he knew.

His stomach rumbled. Food service aboard the flight was nonexistent. They had been fed once when the jet had landed at Vladivostok, and then once again, many hours later, at the refueling stop near Tashkent. Neither time had any of the passengers been allowed to step off the plane.

They had crossed the wild hill country where Kazakh horsemen still dressed in furs and conical felt hats and rode stubby ponies after their herds of sheep and goats. Now the grassland, the eternal steppe, with the city of Baikanur coming up and beyond it, the rocket-launching base of Tyuratam.

Stoner sensed someone leaning over him and turned in his seat. It was Markov, an odd little half-smile on his bearded face.

“We enter the country the same way our revered Lenin did, in 1917,” Markov said, nearly shouting to be heard over the thundering vibration of the jet engines.

“Lenin flew in?”

Markov lowered his lanky body into the seat next to Stoner’s. “No, the Germans sent him into Mother Russia in a sealed train. No stops, no one allowed on or off until it reached Petrograd. We fly in from the other direction, in a sealed airplane.”

Stoner tapped the window with a fingernail. “It’s a big country out there, your Mother Russia.”

“Oh, this isn’t Russia,” Markov corrected. “It’s Kazakhstan, a Federated Republic, part of the Soviet Union. But not Russia. These people are Asians…Mongols. Russia is another thousand kilometers to the west, on the other side of the Ural Mountains.”

“But it’s part of your country.”

Nodding, “Yes, just as Puerto Rico is part of the United States.”

Stoner looked out the window again. “Pretty damned big. And it looks untouched…raw.”

“Much of the Soviet Union is still virgin land,” Markov said. “It was Khrushchev’s dream to cultivate such lands, make them yield rich harvests.”

“What happened?”

Markov’s grin turned sardonic. “He was outvoted…while his back was turned.”

“Oh.”

“They allowed him a peaceful retirement, though. He died of natural causes. Very unusual for a Russian leader. A sign of our growing civilization.”

Stoner asked, “Are you laughing or crying, Kirill?”

With a shrug, Markov said, “Some of both, my friend. Some of both. I feel like a life-sentence prisoner returning to jail after a brief escape. It’s hateful, but it’s home.”

“I should’ve talked to you into staying at Kwajalein,” Stoner said, lowering his voice even though the drone of the engines made it impossible to hear anything a few feet away.

“No, no,” Markov protested. “This is where I belong. This is where I should be.”

Stoner searched the Russian’s face. “You really believe that?”

Markov closed his ice-blue eyes and nodded gravely. “I have talked about it at some length with Maria. We are going to try to work things out between us. She will put in for a transfer to a…a less demanding job.” His boyish grin returned. “If I can make
her
more human, easier to live with, perhaps there is hope for the rest of the Russians as well.”

Stoner sensed there was much more going on in Markov’s marriage than the Russian was willing to talk about.

“In the meantime,” Markov went on, “all of us here will act as your bodyguard. You are part of us, and we are part of you. You will get to fly into space, never fear.”

“That’s all I ask,” Stoner said.

Markov’s face grew serious. “I know there has been talk about a Russian plot against you.”

“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.

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

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.”

“That is my religion. The same religion as Einstein: ‘The eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility.’ ”

Markov grinned at him. “Americans are optimists by nature.”

“Not by nature,” Stoner corrected. “By virtue of historical fact. The optimists always win in the long run.”

“Well, my optimistic friend, I hope you are right. I hope that this alien is friendly and helpful. I wouldn’t want to have to bow down to someone who isn’t even human.”

They walked back into the common room, coffee cups in hand. The Russian medical technician sitting in the corner looked up at them, pointed to his wristwatch and said something to Markov.

“He wants to remind you that you get your shot at eleven.”

Stoner made a smile for the technician. “Tell him I appreciate his sadistic concern and I’d like to take his needle and stick it up his fat ass.”

The technician smiled and nodded as Markov spoke to him in Russian.

Beethoven ended and the little oblong radio on the bookshelf started playing chamber music: gentle, civilized strings, abstract, mathematical.

“Bach, isn’t it?” Stoner asked, taking one of the leather chairs that flanked the room’s only couch.

Markov sighed. “Vivaldi.”

The outside door banged open and Jo stamped into the room, making annoyed brushing motions across her arms.

“Mosquitoes,” she said. “Big as jet fighters.”

“One of the joys of the countryside,” Markov said.

Jo wore jeans and a light sweater. She ran a hand through her hair as she complained, “They have those damned floodlights all around the building. You can’t see the sky at all, and they won’t let you walk past the lighted area.”

“But look on the positive side,” Markov suggested. “The floodlights attract the mosquitoes.”

She laughed, despite herself, and came over toward the sofa. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Too keyed up.”

“Would you like some coffee?” Stoner asked.

“That’d just make it worse.”

“A glass of hot tea, perhaps?” Markov offered. “Or some vodka.”

“No alcohol. I’ve got to keep my head clear for tomorrow, even if they won’t let me actually get my hands on any of the hardware.”

“Perhaps we could get our medical friend here to give you the shot he’s going to give Stoner. It puts you into a deep, relaxing sleep and then lets you wake up the next morning clear as a mountain lake.”

“So they claim,” Stoner put it.

“No thanks,” Jo said. Looking at the technician, she asked, “Does he understand English?”

“No,” Markov said. “Only Russian.”

“Where’s he from?”

Markov asked the technician, who smiled hugely for her, revealing a picket fence of stainless steel inlays, and answered with a long string of heartfelt words.

“He comes from a little village near Leningrad,” Markov translated, “the most beautiful little village in all of Russia. He would love to show you how beautiful it is, especially in the springtime.”

Jo smiled back at him, asking, “He’s really a Russian, then? Not a Ukrainian or a Georgian or a Kazakh.”

Markov glanced at the overweight, red-haired, fair-skinned medical technician. “He is quite Russian, I guarantee it. But why this interest in our federated nationalities?”

Turning back to Markov and Stoner, Jo answered, “I’ve been talking with some of the people around here—you know, guards, clerks, ordinary people.”

“Not astronomers or linguists,” Markov murmured.

Ignoring him, Jo went on, “A lot of the Russians here are kind of worried about the Kazakhs, and other non-Russian ethnic groups.”

“Worried?” Stoner asked.

“The tide of Islam,” Markov said in a bored tone. “Ever since Iran and Afghanistan, the major topic of gossip is the possibility of a native uprising. It’s quite impossible, you know.”

“An uprising,” Jo said. “But what about sabotage? Suppose the people who used Schmidt use some Kazakh technician to tamper with the rocket booster tomorrow?”

Markov shook his head and raised his hands toward the ceiling. “No, no, no! Impossible. That’s one thing that our security people have checked quite thoroughly. No one but Russian nationals has been allowed near the boosters. That, I promise you.”

“Am I safe from all the Russian nationals?” Stoner asked.

For an instant, Markov did not answer. Then, one hand stroking his beard, he said very seriously, “Yes, you are. I am certain of it.”

The two men looked at each other, eye to eye, for a long wordless moment.

“I think I would like some of that tea,” Jo said, breaking their wordless moment.

“Allow me.” Markov was instantly heading for the kitchen. “I will make you a glass of tea that will soothe your nerves and invigorate your spirit. Not like that dreadful sludge they call coffee. Phah! How can anyone drink that stuff regularly?”

Stoner laughed as Markov went through the kitchen door. He’s leaving the two of us alone, he realized. Jo sat on the couch next to the shuttered window. The Russian technician stayed at his chair in the corner. Stoner went over and sat next to Jo.

“My last night on Earth,” he said. Then he added, “For a week or so.”

“Aren’t you nervous?”

“Hell yes.”

“You don’t look it. You look perfectly calm.”

“On the outside. Inside, everything’s twitching. If you took an x-ray picture of me, it’d come out blurred, unless you used a stop-action shutter on the camera lens.”

Jo laughed softly.

“I always get nervous before a flight, especially the last few minutes before lift-off. My heart rate goes way up.”

“That’s understandable,” she said. Her face grew somber. “You can still back out of it, you know. The Russians have cosmonauts in reserve who…”

“I know,” he said.

“You’re not afraid of them trying to—to stop you?”

“Kirill’s been watching over me like a St. Bernard.”

“That’s not enough…”

“And so have you,” he added. “I’ve been watching you poking around, getting mosquito bites while you’re checking out everybody around here.”

She looked surprised. “I haven’t…well, the two of us aren’t enough of a bodyguard for you.”

He reached out and clasped the back of her neck. “I appreciate it, Jo. I understand what you’re doing and I appreciate it, really I do.”

“Sure you do.”

“I do. I hope you understand why I’m being so stubborn about all this.”

Nodding, she answered, “Yes, I do understand, Keith. That’s what frightens me. I’d be doing exactly the same thing, in your place. But I hate the fact that you’re doing it, you’re taking the chances with your life.”