Voyagers III - Star Brothers (27 page)

KIRK Matthews cherished the simple life. No matter that he was in charge of a secret Vanguard Corporation base buried far out in Mare Imbrium. No matter that neither he nor the three dozen technicians living in the base knew what the hell was being created in the gigantic vat at the heart of the underground complex. The simple life was what he sought.

Back on Earth there were complexities. An ex-wife seeking every penny he earned. Lawyers hounding him. One of them nursing a broken jaw and several cracked ribs as the result of accosting him once too often.

Here on the Moon life should be simple. All he had to do was supervise thirty-six technicians whose job was to make certain the mysterious twenty-story-high crystalline vat was fed the prescribed chemicals and maintained at certain temperatures and pressures. The technicians were educated, well-balanced, eminently stable men and women. The pay was good, and it was piling up nicely, since there was no place to spend it. Living conditions were somewhat spartan, but much more comfortable than an Earthside courtroom. Or jail cell.

Liaisons among the men and women living in the underground complex were casual and easygoing. They all had signed up for the duration of the experiment at this remote site, knowing that it would take at least two years; they were all consenting adults who preferred not to make permanent attachments.

Matthews clasped his gnarled hands behind his graying crew cut and leaned far back in his desk chair. The simple life. Until this goddamned Latino wandered in.

Paulino Alvarado, as far as Matthews could tell, was neither a spy from another corporation nor a snoop from the International Astronautical Council. He seemed to be a genuinely lost soul, a Vanguard employee who got dangerously lost up there on the lunar surface and would have died if he hadn’t stumbled onto Delphi base.

But now that he was here and had seen whatever the hell it was bubbling away inside the vat, Paulino could not be allowed to leave and blab to the outside world.

Worse still, the kid had a pocket full of Moondust pills. Matthews didn’t believe that Paulino had the guts or personality to be a pusher. But a user was just as bad.

The simple life. Matthews had bucked the whole problem up the chain of command in a carefully coded message to his bosses, back at Archimedes. For days he had waited for a response, while Paulino wandered around the base, not exactly getting in anybody’s way, but he sure enough made people nervous.

Apparently the problem had been directed all the way back to corporate headquarters, because Hilo was where the message resting on Matthews’s desk had come from. The monomolecular-thin slip of reusable plastic bore a mere seven words, plus the name of the sender. An explosive seven words:

Stoner sat impassively through all the medical tests that the two tall, many-armed robots put him through. His mind, though, spent the whole morning probing the massive machine guarding the door to his room, tracing the pathways of its computer brain’s programming. For hours he allowed the robots to take blood samples, test his reflexes, run him on the treadmill, check his eyesight and hearing.

They sprayed electrodes onto the skin of his chest, back, and legs. They minutely examined the charred stump of his little finger. They fitted a helmet over his tangled thick hair and connected it to a multichannel brainwave recorder.

Not a word from the ceiling speakers. The robots had been precisely programmed for these tests; no human direction was necessary. I could finagle these machines, Stoner said to himself. Their networks are complex enough to allow me to slip in and plant changes. They’re not pre-programmed inflexible tin soldiers like the robot guarding the door.

Maybe I could even get one of them to turn off the guard robot, if I had enough time to tinker. Time. It always comes down to a matter of time.

Stoner could sense the presence of Zoltan Janos watching, could feel the tension of the Hungarian scientist as he studied the curves flickering across the display screens, taste the perspiration beading his lip.

He could not sense Ilona. She was not in the room with the monitoring equipment, where Janos was. Stoner could not feel her presence anywhere.

He returned his attention to the guard robot outside the door. The robot’s computer was hard-wired; it contained one set of instructions and one only. It could not be reprogrammed unless you got inside and changed the wiring. The only way to prevent the robot from doing its job was to physically reach the circuit breakers on its back and shut off its power.

Stoner actually smiled, even though he saw nothing humorous. The robot was like the Varangian guards that Byzantine emperors hired: foreigners who understood only their duty to the emperor and nothing else, not even the language of the land they lived in. Utterly loyal because they knew nothing else.

At last the medical robots picked up all their equipment and trundled out of the room. As the lock clicked behind them, Stoner looked up to the ceiling speaker and asked, “When do I get some food?”

Janos’s voice replied, “You feel hunger?”

“Damned right I do!”

A few moments of hesitation. Then, “Tonight, perhaps. More likely tomorrow morning. I must analyze the data from these tests first.”

“And then what, another finger?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.”

Stoner caught a fleeting impression of the robots clamping his head in their steel fingers while a laser beam deftly excised one of his eyes.

An electric current of fear shocked through him even before his star brother could damp it down. He felt his innards calm even while his mind screamed with outraged fury.

And he heard himself say coldly, “If you’re thinking of injecting some of my blood into your own veins, remember what happened to Novotny.”

No answer, but Stoner could sense the surprise and sudden fear that hit Janos.

“Once those symbiotes are in your blood,” Stoner went on, “you can’t look out at the world as you did before. You realize, every moment of every day, awake or asleep, that you are not alone. It’s more than having another presence within your body and your mind. You begin to understand that you are not merely an individual. You start to see that you, as a single unit, are part of an entirety, a link between past and future, a member of a family.”

Still Janos said nothing. He was listening, and Stoner could sense the tangle of curiosity and fear and burning ambition that swirled within him.

“That understanding drove Novotny into a collapse. What will it do to you? How do you think you’ll feel about the experiments you’ve been doing on me, once you and I are linked as firmly as two cells of the same creature? What do you think it’ll be like when you can feel what I feel, when you can sense my pain and anguish?”

“Thank you, Dr. Stoner,” said Janos, in a very subdued voice. “Thank you for the warning. I was indeed tempted to inject myself to obtain your powers. I thought that what happened to Novotny was due to his age, perhaps, or his own psychological weaknesses.”

Shaking his head, Stoner replied, “Novotny saw himself as a member of the human family for the first time since he’d been weaned.”

“And have you led such a blameless life, that the alien symbiotes did not drive you insane?”

“Hardly,” Stoner said to the ceiling speaker. “But I was aboard their ship for years, frozen in cryonic suspension. They had a long time to assimilate my memories, to make my unconscious mind grow accustomed to their presence.”

“I see,” said Janos thoughtfully. “I see.”

“So you’re out here to help that stupid ape get laid. That’s cute.”

Lela sat by the campfire, silently watching her five captors as they prepared their dinner. The utter darkness of the moonless night and the foliage pressing all around their simple camp made her feel terribly cut off from all civilization, all possible help. She felt the chill of the rising mist on her back and the heat of the licking flames on her face. Cold and hot, two kinds of fear that made her tremble and sweat at the same time.

“You must be some kind of sex pervert,” the white man jeered at her. He was short, stocky, red-haired. “You have fantasies about making it with a gorilla, eh?”

“I can put on its head and skin, after we kill it. You like it that way?” one of the black men said.

The others all laughed.

So far they had not harmed her. So far. Their leader, the blond one with the English accent, had made them keep their hands off Lela. But he could not stop their joking threats.

He came up to her now and sat on the rough log beside her, handing her a tin of stew.

“Just pull the top off,” he said softly. “It heats by itself.”

Sitting cross-legged, Lela kept her hands pressed firmly against the heavy twill of her trousers. She was afraid to let the men see how her hands would shake.

The blond placed the can before her, muttering, “Got to eat sometime, y’know.”

“Why are you here?” Lela asked. “Why are you hunting the gorillas? No zoo will buy them from you; we have international agreements. No research laboratory will accept a grown primate.”

The blond smiled sadly. “We’re not hired to sell them, lady. We’re just supposed to kill them. All of them.”

Despite herself Lela clutched at the man. “Kill them? Kill them all? Why?
Why?
”

He held her wrists while the other men stared. “Calm down! Calm yourself.”

“Why do you kill them?” Lela demanded.

“If the gorillas are gone, then there’s no further purpose for this reserve, is there? The land can be sold to developers.”

“Developers? To develop what?”

The blond shrugged. “New cities, I imagine. Kampala, Ruhengeri, Bukavu—all the old cities are bursting at their seams, aren’t they? There’s no place to put all the people. They’re spreading out all across the countryside.”

“But not here!” Lela snapped. “Not this far away…”

Patiently, almost like a schoolteacher, the blond explained, “There are people—powerful people—who want to build whole new cities. Cut down the forests and make more farmland. Build roads and airports and even spaceports.”

“But the gorillas are
protected
by international agreement! They can’t build here!”

“They can if the apes are all gone. In a few months they will be.”

Lela was aghast. “You can’t…the rangers…the World Court…”

The blond gave her a pitying look. “I told you, we’re dealing with very powerful people here. Why do you think we can have a fire each night without the satellites reporting us to your rangers? We know you’ve got a locator beacon imbedded in your skin; the satellites are tracking you okay but the information isn’t going to the rangers either.”

“No! It cannot be!”

“Why not?” He pulled a slim dark brown cigar from the pocket of his shirt, clamped it in his teeth and lit it. Lela stared at its glowing tip, her mind racing.

“What you do is wrong,” she said. “It is evil.”

He blew a puff of gray smoke into the night. “Why should anybody care more about your stupid apes than they do about people? Human beings who need homes and jobs?”

“You don’t have to wipe out the gorillas to make homes and jobs for people,” Lela answered.

“That’s a university graduate talking. My older brother went to university. I worked like a dog to help support him. Now he’s off saving the bleeding whales somewhere up in the Arctic and I’m here, hunting down the last of the gorillas. Queer world, isn’t it?”

Lela stared at him. He puffed on his cigar for a while, then started to look uncomfortable. Without another word he hauled himself to his feet and walked slowly to the four other men sitting close to the fire, grinning at Lela.

They’re going to kill me, Lela realized. They can’t let me go, not after what he’s told me. They’re going to kill me. When they’re finished with me.

“RICKIE, you and I are going to take a little vacation,” Jo said brightly, with an enthusiasm she did not truly feel.

They were sitting at the breakfast table, set in a sunny glassed-in alcove off the kitchen.

Rickie looked up from his raisins and flakes. “A vacation? Where?”

“How would you like to see our center on the Moon?”

The ten-year-old’s eyes widened. “The Moon! Wow!”

“You can ask a couple of your friends along, if you like.”

“Can I? Can I
now?
”

“Sure. As long as you finish your breakfast after you’ve called them.”

Rickie was off his chair and dashing to the phone in the kitchen before Jo could finish the sentence. She leaned her elbows on the glass-topped table and sipped at her steaming coffee. The psychologists said that Rickie was adjusting healthily to the traumatic shock he had gone through. He slept through the night now, and claimed that he no longer had nightmares. His appetite seemed normal enough, and the guardians that Jo had surrounded him with, in the guise of household servants, reported that he did not seem to be overly fearful or nervous.

Twice since that horrible night, Jo had taken her son to the Vanguard research laboratory where tissue from murdered Cathy’s body was being treated in the plastic womb of a cloning tank. She carefully explained that Cathy was going to be born again, a new little baby who would grow up to be the sister he had known.

“She’s not gone from us forever, Rickie. She’ll come back to us.”

Holding his mother’s hand, Rickie had smiled up at Jo and said, “Only I’ll be her big brother and she’ll be my little sister, right, Mom?”

Jo had laughed. “Right.”

His smile was replaced by a worried, “Will Dad come back to us, too?”

Jo felt her heart constrict within her. “Yes,” she promised. “Your father will return to us.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Rickie. All I know is that somehow he’ll come back to us.”

True to his word, Janos sent in the serving robot the next morning with a tray of breakfast.

“Good morning, Dr. Stoner. I trust you slept well,” said the squat little robot, as if nothing had happened since the last time it had come into the room.

Stoner did not reply. The robot placed the breakfast tray on the little table in the corner of the room opposite the medical monitoring equipment and rolled out the door without another word. The guard stood out in the hallway; it had not moved a millimeter since Stoner had first challenged it more than a week earlier.

Eggs, sausages, half a melon, thick slabs of bread, a pot of honey, and a large glass of milk. Stoner broke his imposed fast with a will. The food disappeared quickly.

All morning long he was left alone in the room. No voices from the ceiling speakers. No robots coming in to test him. Or slice him up. Stoner probed with his mind but could sense no other human beings. Alone? he wondered. Have they packed up and left?

That didn’t make sense. But for a few moments he pondered the possibility of being abandoned to die in the deserted emptiness of Old Beirut. Nobody left but me and that stupid, stubborn pile of transistors outside the door. It would be an odd way to die.

As he began to wonder if he could break through one of the walls into another room, and get into the hallway and out of the hotel that way, the ceiling speaker crackled.

“Dr. Stoner,” said Janos’s voice, “I have news for you. We will be leaving this place shortly.”

The Hungarian’s voice sounded unhappy. He’s being forced to stop his experiment, Stoner told himself. Ilona got to his boss, whoever that is, and now he’s got to stop playing with me.

“Where are we going?” Stoner asked aloud.

“That is of no consequence to you.”

Yes, Janos was definitely miffed. Stoner smiled. Wherever they were going, it would be better than this. And he might get an opportunity to get away from this maniac.

Hours passed, then finally one of the tall many-armed robots came into his room, pulled Stoner’s arms behind his back and snapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. Then it slipped a burlap hood over Stoner’s head. The bag smelled of coffee. It effectively blocked his vision, although the robot did not tie it tight around his neck, so some light filtered in and Stoner could see a sliver of the floor at his feet.

Almost immediately he realized what was happening. They have to move me, and it will probably be by plane. They won’t have room for the robots. They’ll have to come into fairly close contact with me. Janos is afraid that I’ll be able to control him and the others, and he thinks that my ability to manipulate people depends on my being able to see them—like a hypnotist.

He almost danced down the hallway as the robot led him out of the room. That’s Janos’s mistake! He thinks he’ll be safe as long as I can’t see him. How wrong he is!

Relief and a strange, bitter form of elation flooded Stoner. I don’t have to see him, I don’t have to touch him. Just let me get close enough to talk to the sonofabitch without an intercom system between us. Just let me into the same room with him and I’ll bend his brain into pretzels. I’ll twist his guts inside out. I’ll snap his bones, each and every one of them!

His star brother said nothing, but Stoner sensed the alien presence’s cool disapproval. Slowly, slowly as the robot led him carefully into an ancient elevator that wheezed and groaned as it descended and then out across a wide expanse that
must
have been the hotel’s lobby and finally through a creaking set of boards that served as a door and into the hot brightness of real sunlight—slowly Stoner’s exhilaration died away.

Patience, he told himself. Remember the story of the young bull and the old bull. He felt the touch of his star brother’s curiosity. Smiling inwardly, Stoner explained, The young bull sees a herd of cows grazing in the distance and says to the old bull, “I’m going to run over there and grab a cow for myself.” The old bull says, “Let’s walk calmly and get all of them.”

His star brother smiled back. Let Janos take us to his superiors. Then we will find out who is behind all this.

Yes, Stoner said. Let him take me to those who are responsible for Cathy’s murder. He saw his daughter’s body floating in the swimming pool again, saw her blood spreading across the lighted water. His elation turned to pain.

He was bundled into a car of some sort, probably a van from the way he had to climb up and slide into a padded bench. Not much light, despite the brilliantly sunny day. The van either had no windows in its rear or they had been painted over to conceal whoever sat in back. Couldn’t be a limousine, Stoner told himself. Even blindfolded he knew that.

No one said a word to him, but he sensed the presence of Ilona Lucacs sitting in front of him. Stoner remained silent, realizing that Ilona had indeed called Janos’s superiors as he had asked her to. Did Janos know that she had done this? Stoner sensed that he did, and he was furious with her.

Janos was not in this vehicle. Stoner made himself as comfortable as he could with his hands cuffed behind him as the van lurched and careened along the empty streets of Old Beirut. Soon they were on a highway, and within a quarter hour Stoner began to hear traffic noises. The shrill whine of a jet plane screeched overhead. They were approaching the airport.

Out to a big hangar they drove. Stoner heard an overhead door rattle shut behind them and, as they helped him out of the van, voices echoing inside the closed hangar. He smelled machine oil and the cold metallic tang of cryogenic piping and pumps that handled the liquid hydrogen used to fuel airplanes.

Standing in the midst of a small knot of people he counted six huddled around him, one of them Ilona, the others strangers. No robots. No Janos.

As he wondered what would happen next, the door clattered open again and another car drove in. Stoner sensed Janos, and then heard his voice speaking in English to the others. He felt an immense wave of relief. He wanted Janos with him.

They led him carefully up the aluminum ladder of a small transport plane and moved him back toward the rear. Without a word, the men who were guiding him pushed his head down slightly so he would not bump it on the narrowing ceiling panels. They went through a partition, sat him in a seat, and buckled a seat belt across his lap.

“Can’t you take off these handcuffs?” Stoner asked through his burlap hood. “It’s damned uncomfortable.”

The two men with him said nothing. They left him alone, closing the partition door behind them.

The plane lurched into movement. Since the engines had not yet started, Stoner realized they were being towed to the runway. He heard voices through the flimsy partition, all of them speaking in English, although the accents told him none of the speakers were natives of the language.

That means they come from different countries, Stoner thought. Their native tongues differ, so they speak the international language: English. Which means that they’re not all Hungarian. Whoever Janos is working for, it’s not the president of Hungary anymore. Nor the Hungarian government.

Maybe it never was. The thought startled him.

Li-Po Hsen eased back in the sunken Japanese hot tub and allowed the nearly scalding water to cover him almost to his chin.

Of all the luxuries that one could have on the Moon, abundant water was still the most precious. The engineers could manufacture water out of oxygen from the lunar rocks and hydrogen from the solar wind, imbedded in the top few centimeters of the soil. But it took so much energy to harvest the hydrogen and to extract the oxygen that water was literally more expensive than titanium on the Moon.

Pacific Commerce had spaceport operations at each of the half-dozen bases on the Moon, no matter who owned the base itself. Hsen’s only competition in space transportation came from Vanguard Industries, and even at Vanguard’s facilities in Archimedes and elsewhere Pacific shared the transport franchise.

Hsen’s own private retreat on the Moon was at Pacific Commerce’s recreational facility at Hell, a twenty-mile-wide impact crater where Pacific had built a casino and posh tourist hotel that catered to mountain climbers and other kinds of gamblers.

It pleased Hsen that his safe retreat was in Hell, a crater named after a Jesuit astronomer, irony upon irony. He had built a modest home for himself there, deep underground, since he did not want to attract the attention of potential rivals and enemies. No one should suspect that the head of Pacific Commerce could live in comfort for as long as he wished on the Moon. Therefore his household staff was small, his quarters almost spartan when compared to his various homes on Earth.

The chambers were decorated in Japanese style, which seemed most appropriate for the setting. Spare, clean, the rooms almost empty of furniture. Except for the western conveniences such as a large, comfortable bed hidden behind wall panels. Instead of wood panelling and flooring, Hsen’s quarters used plastic manufactured on the Moon, textured and painted to resemble wood. It was not that a man of Hsen’s means could not afford to bring the necessary wood to the Moon; he used lunar plastic to avoid calling attention to a domicile he intended to keep secret.

Now he lay back in his steaming tub while two boyishly slim young women knelt at the tub’s edge, naked and silent, waiting to administer to whatever whim possessed their master.

But Hsen’s attention was focused on the screen of the telephone that had been placed on the floor at the edge of the sunken tub. Vic Tomasso’s face looked wary, evasive. The man was smiling, but his eyes were cold. Tomasso was in the tourist hotel built into Hell’s ringwall, above Hsen’s deeply-buried quarters.

“Please give me a direct answer,” Hsen said with the soft hiss of a dagger sliding out of its sheath. “Do you have the plan of Delphi base or do you not?”

“Not yet,” Tomasso said.

“You will be able to get it? You realize that the information you have given me so far concerning this so-called secret base is useless without some actual proof of its existence.”

“It’s there, all right,” Tomasso countered. “Hard to find, I know, but it’s there.”

“And the proof?”

“I can get it for you.”

“How soon?”

Tomasso’s eyes shifted away, then returned to Hsen’s gaze again. “I don’t like to be blunt, but—what’s in it for me?”

Hsen nodded once, slightly, a movement that dipped his chin into the steaming water. “A reasonable question. At the moment you are being followed by an operative from Ms. Camerata’s household—”

“What?”

Suppressing a smile of pleasure at the man’s surprise, Hsen replied, “One of the Italians from her personal staff followed you from the space station to your hotel.”

“I didn’t see…” Tomasso’s voice trailed off, his face went slightly pale.

“In payment for your information about Delphi
—complete
information about its location and layout—in return for that I will protect you from the bitch’s personal assassin.”

Tomasso licked his suddenly-dry lips and agreed to the bargain.

TOKYO

THE rioting had gone completely beyond all control. From the walls of the old imperial palace to the heart of the Ginza, hundreds of thousands of maddened Japanese battled the police, the army, each other. They howled and screamed. They threw stones and homemade fire bombs at the police, who crouched behind plastic riot shields as they were slowly forced to retreat. The tear gas that the police fired into the mob had no effect; there were simply too many people. Those who were gassed were trampled underfoot by those behind them.

Panic. Outright terror. The riot had started when a young woman had collapsed on the platform of a commuter train station, writhing and screaming in terrible agony. The Horror had struck once again.

But this time the others on the station platform made a mad rush for the exits. Fifty people were crushed to death in the panic. The terrified people spilled out into the streets of a heavily-trafficked shopping area, running blindly to escape the Horror.

Like an infectious agent of its own the panic swept the shopping area and spread onward at the speed of human sight and hearing. The Horror. The Horror is
here
! It is striking down people left and right. No one is safe. Run! Run!