Voyagers II - The Alien Within (33 page)

“How do you know?…”

“Trust me.”

Stoner looked at the digital lock for a moment, then tapped out four numbers. The door sprung slightly open.

Jo was standing between the bunk and the sink, her face set determinedly, her back rigid, arms at her sides, hands balled into fists, her jaw stubbornly clenched. Then she realized who had opened the door, and the tension sagged out of her.

“Keith!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said as he and Markov entered the little room. “We’re just visiting.”

“But I thought they had locked you…I mean, I tried that door….”

“I have a way with locks, it turns out.”

She dropped down onto the bunk. Markov sat next to her, looking worried.

“Baker is vicious,” Jo said. “He’s looking forward to hurting you. And me.”

“He won’t get that chance,” replied Stoner.

Markov shook his head. “Do you think you are just going to walk out of here, leading the rest of us like the Pied Piper?”

Stoner grinned. “Leading the children
out
of the mountain instead of into it? Yes, that would be a new twist on the old story, wouldn’t it?”

“You laugh,” Markov marveled. “Doesn’t this frighten you? Have you no fear in you?”

No fear, Stoner thought. No anger. No love or hate or joy. They’ve all been buried in ice. All submerged, frozen in an ocean as deep and cold as interstellar space.

Aloud, he answered, “Fear has two components to it, Kirill. There’s the intellectual awareness of something that might harm you. And there’s the emotional, glandular reaction to that perception. I’m fully aware of the danger we’re in. But it won’t do us any good to let our glands dominate our brains, will it?”

Markov stared at him. “Cool as ice. You must have little glaciers running through your veins in place of blood.”

How close you are to the truth, my old friend, Stoner replied silently.

The door slammed open suddenly, and Baker stood there, mouth agape.

“How in the hell…?”

An Linh appeared behind him, her eyes wide, too.

“Don’t look so surprised,” Stoner said as pleasantly as if the man had just dropped by for a cocktail. “You brought me here to learn about things I can do. Well, it turns out that I’m pretty good at handling locks.”

Baker’s eyes narrowed to suspicious slits. “You’re in a jovial mood, are you?”

“Come on in, don’t stand out in the hall,” Stoner invited. “Join the party.”

Baker took An Linh by the arm, and they both entered the little room. Now it felt crowded, and Stoner could feel the heat of their bodies, make out their different scents.

“You must think you’re pretty clever,” Baker said.

Stoner shrugged. “And you must think that I’ve got some tremendous secrets locked up in my brain, and if you can get me to tell what they are, your World Liberation Movement will be able to topple all the governments and take over control of the whole Earth.”

“Something like that.”

“Fine,” said Stoner, “I’ll tell you everything I know. Happily. It won’t help you much, but I’ll hide nothing from you.”

“Really?”

“Providing you let my friends go.”

Baker smiled crookedly. “So that’s it. Let them go, and you’ll sing sweetly for us.”

“That’s it.”

“And if we don’t?”

“I won’t sing at all,” answered Stoner.

“Then we’ll have to persuade you, won’t we?”

“Do you think you can?”

Baker turned his gaze toward Jo, still sitting on the bunk. “Oh, I think maybe
she
can. Properly encouraged, of course.”

Stoner looked deep into Baker’s eyes and saw the cynicism, the anger and hurt that went far back into his childhood. Very early in his life, Cliff Baker had learned that he could not trust people, especially people who held authority over him. As a youngster he had feared his father and known that his mother would never protect him against her husband. The university instructor who had recruited him for the World Liberation Movement had played on that distrust, Stoner knew. He could envision the moment. The instructor, as youthful and cynical as Baker himself, turning the student’s angry bitterness at his parents into an angry bitterness against Them: the invisible, ubiquitous, all-powerful Them; the enemy, the university administration and big corporations and national governments and banks and politicians and corporate executives and anyone and everyone who held more power, flaunted more wealth, stood one step higher in society than he did himself.

Stoner smiled back at him sadly. “Cliff, I know who you want to hurt, and it’s none of us.”

“You’ll do for starters,” Baker snapped.

“No, Cliff. You don’t want to hurt us. You don’t want to hurt anyone but yourself.”

“You think so?” Baker said uncertainly.

Stoner noticed the rhythm of his breathing had increased ever so slightly. Baker’s mouth seemed suddenly dry. He swallowed hard. Picturing the living heart pumping beneath Baker’s ribs, Stoner watched it skip a beat.

“I know it’s true,” he said. “You want to die. I can see it in your mind. And you will die, unless you turn away from the violence you’re planning.”

Unconsciously rubbing a hand across his shirt, Baker growled, “Stop trying to hypnotize me. It won’t work.”

Stoner went on, “Cliff, you want to know what’s stored up in my head. I don’t know the full extent of it myself. All I can tell you is that whatever’s there seems to come to the surface of my consciousness when I need it. It’s as if the alien is inside my skull, like another person, and when I need his help he gives it to me.”

Baker said nothing.

“So don’t push me to the point where I need to show you your own inner self. That would kill you, Cliff. You’d kill yourself, willingly.”

The crowded cell fell silent. In the distance, Stoner could hear footsteps clicking on the stone floor. They drew nearer. All heads turned toward the open door.

“Guards coming,” An Linh whispered.

“They will find us here,” said Markov, a hint of fear in his voice.

Baker said nothing. His eyes still locked on Stoner’s, but a relieved little smile crept across his lips.

Jo got to her feet to stand beside Stoner. She did not touch him, nor he her, but he knew that she felt somehow safer by being close to him. Mammalian instinct, he thought. The warmth of the body gives comfort. How we hate to be alone and in the cold.

Stoner tried to estimate the number of men approaching from the sounds of their footfalls. At least six, he thought. No more than eight.

Suddenly the footsteps stopped, and the doorway was filled with the huge bulk of a tall, broad-shouldered, thick-set Oriental wearing outlandish battle fatigues of green jungle camouflage, glistening black paratrooper boots, and a wide black leather belt. A heavy gold medallion hung around his neck. His head was completely hairless, his face as beefy and large as the rest of him.

Wordlessly, he looked over the five people inside the cell. Behind him, a squad of six guards in tan coveralls stood at grim-faced attention. Each of them carried a submachine gun.

The Oriental broke into a huge grin. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he said in a deep, reverberating voice. “I watched you on the closed-circuit television, Dr. Stoner. How on earth did you open the lock on your door? From the inside, at that! Fantastic!”

Stoner felt a wave of astonishment wash over him. Obviously this man was the leader here. But to Stoner he seemed more like a clown than a threat.

“Mr. Baker, please introduce me to your friends,” he commanded.

“This is Temujin,” said Baker with just a tinge of sarcasm, “the supreme chief of the World Liberation Movement.”

Stoner found himself thinking, No, not the supreme chief. He can’t be.

“I am very impressed with your talents, Dr. Stoner,” said Temujin, still smiling cordially. “Perhaps we can discuss them over dinner.”

Like the host of a summer weekend at a country villa, Temujin led the five of them down the corridor.

“I am afraid that the food here isn’t all that it should be, but I will endeavor to see that you at least don’t go hungry.”

They reached a metal door set into the rock wall. Temujin touched his medallion and the door slid open, revealing an elevator cab big enough to hold a dozen people. He gestured them into the elevator, then followed himself. The guards remained outside. They rode up; Stoner estimated two levels, but it was impossible to tell inside the closed elevator car. The door opened onto a large chamber, empty except for a long dining table set for six. And three gleaming robots standing off to one side like a trio of cylindrical metal sculptures, their multiple arms neatly folded to their sides.

Doors were set into the far wall, and bare tubes of fluorescent lights ran across the ceiling.

“Please, be seated. Dr. Stoner, Dr. Markov, next to me, if you please.” Temujin strode to the head of the table and took the chair there.

Slightly more than an hour later they were picking at a dessert of melon and yogurt, flown in every week from Afghanistan, according to Temujin. Through most of the dinner he had talked discursively about his choice of name for himself, his humble origins, how he had founded the World Liberation Movement, its growth, its accomplishments, its goals.

“Being a Korean,” he was saying, “my first object was to reunite the two halves of my country, cruelly separated at the whim of the two so-called superpowers. My father fought for national unity; he was a captain in the North Korean Army. Killed in action in 1950. I was merely a baby then, but I vowed to carry on his work.”

Stoner ate slowly, sipped at the warming tea that the robots kept bringing. They never allowed a cup to go dry, and they never missed a cup when they poured.

“By the time I reached my manhood,” Temujin rambled on, “it became apparent to me that the problem of reuniting Korea was actually a small part of a much larger problem, a global problem. That was when the World Liberation Movement was born.”

“And eventually absorbed the PLO, the IRA, the Red Guards, and most of the other liberation movements,” Baker added from the far end of the table.

Temujin favored him with a small nod. “Yes. By the time I was thirty, we were consolidating the world’s freedom fighters into a unified entity—with the help, I should mention, of the Soviet Union.”

Markov’s white brows climbed toward his scalp.

“But the leaders in the Kremlin began to fear us,” Temujin went on, scowling slightly in Markov’s direction. “They did not want to allow liberation of
their
colonial possessions! They turned against us.”

Stoner suppressed a smile as he watched Markov’s face across the table from him.

“You have overlooked one tiny detail,” Markov said. “Scientists from the Soviet Union and the United States learned how to make a defense against nuclear weapons.”

“Yes, they learned it from the alien starship.” Temujin gave Stoner a sour glance.

Markov went on, “This defense, this ability to protect ourselves from nuclear terror, changed the entire world political situation.”

“Not the entire situation,” Temujin shot back. “It changed the power struggle between your two nations. It encouraged you to combine against the poor and nonwhite peoples of the world. It
intensified
the struggle between the rich and the poor!”

This Temujin behaves like a pompous fool, thought Stoner. But then I guess Hitler gave long, rambling speeches after dinner, too.

“Even so,” Temujin continued, “we continued to receive some help from the Soviet Union. And from elsewhere. China has been most cooperative. And the various leaders of Islam have been generally favorable toward us, despite their internal differences.”

“Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran was overthrown and a secular government installed in its place,” Markov pointed out.

“With the help of the Soviet Union,” Temujin said. Then, nodding his gleaming bald head toward Jo, “And with even more generous help from Vanguard Industries, I might add.”

With a slight nod of her own, Jo said, “We also managed to stop your terrorist movement in Latin America.”

“Temporarily, Mrs. Nillson. Only temporarily. There is no way that we can be permanently stopped. The will of the people always prevails, in the long run. And we prefer to call ourselves revolutionaries, not terrorists.”

“But the people want prosperity,” said Jo. “They want jobs and money in their pockets, not terrorism and hunger. Above all they want peace.”

“They will have jobs, and money, and peace—once we have wrested away the wealth from your rich nations and your fat corporations that hold down the nonwhite peoples of the world.”

“Those corporations,” Jo shot back, “are spreading more wealth among the people than you’ll ever be able to do. All you can do is tear things down, destroy and kill. We can build. We can create. We generate wealth and we spread it all around the world.”

Temujin laughed. “Yes, of course. I know your philosophy. But you move too slowly. Too much of the wealth stays in your pretty white hands, not enough gets to the people who generated it with the sweat of their black and brown and yellow brows.”

“Your way just spreads misery and death,” Jo insisted.

“We shall see, Mrs. Nillson. History shall be our judge.”

“What do you plan?” Stoner asked.

Temujin spread his powerful arms wide. “What do we not plan?” He laughed. “Members of our Movement are at work on every continent, in every nation—yes, Mrs. Nillson, even inside every multinational corporation.”

“Doing what?” prompted Stoner.

“Not far from here, in the missile silos where the Soviet government has replaced their nuclear warheads with warheads containing genetically altered viruses that will produce diseases for which there is no cure—my men are infiltrating the missile crews, preparing to seize the silos and aim those missiles at Moscow and Paris and New York.”

Markov gasped.

“In Hanoi”—he shifted his gaze to An Linh—“secret adherents to the World Liberation Movement have penetrated the highest levels of government and will soon arrange a border incident that will allow Vietnam to invade south China.”

“But the Chinese are helping you!” An Linh blurted.

Temujin’s answer was a booming laugh. “And so are many others who will be brought under our control!”

Stoner shook his head. This man is a windbag with delusions of grandeur. He can’t be in control of all these efforts; he hasn’t the capacity. He may
think
he’s running the show, but somebody is controlling him.

“And in the meantime,” Stoner said aloud, “you fomented the war in central Africa.”

“Fomented?” Temujin looked insulted. “We fomented nothing, Dr. Stoner. Could the World Liberation Movement, or any human organization,
foment
the spread of the Sahara Desert into the farming lands of the south Sahara regions? Could we
foment
mass starvation?”

“Perhaps not,” Stoner admitted. “But what did you do to help feed the starving?”

“We struck at the inequalities that caused the starvation!”

“You let them starve while you started a war that’s spread all across the middle of the continent.”

“Yes! Exactly! And what did your Europeans and Americans and Japanese do? They created this so-called International Peacekeeping Force to fight against us!”

Jo, sitting at Stoner’s right, said, “The people of Chad and Nigeria and other African nations asked for help….”

“Not so! The
governments
of those nations asked for help. Not the people. The people are with us.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Stoner.

“They are!” Temujin insisted. “And we were winning the war, until you came along with your cease-fire agreement.”

Stoner said calmly, “The people in the villages, the people you claim to be liberating, want an end to the killing. The Peacekeepers can help them to learn how to deal with the encroachments of the desert, how to take their energy needs from the sun instead of deforesting their countryside, how to grow food and balance their population growth. They can teach the arts of peace—once the fighting stops.”

“What you mean is that they can teach the Africans how to become slaves of the Europeans once again,” Temujin rumbled.

“No. That time is long gone. You’re living in the past.”

Scowling darkly, Temujin said, “Your cease-fire will not last, Dr. Stoner. I will not allow it to last.”

“You want more blood on your hands?”

“Yes. If killing is necessary to free the captive peoples of the world, then let there be blood! Let there be rivers of blood! Oceans of blood!”

Stoner heard himself say, “Then let the blood be yours.”

Temujin stared at him. “What do you…”

Stoner looked deep into the big man’s eyes, so deeply that he could sense the intricate lacework of microscopic blood vessels within them.

A tear welled in the corner of Temujin’s left eye and rolled down his broad cheek. A tear of blood.

The others gasped.

Temujin flinched back in his chair, looking wildly from one astonished face to another. He grabbed his napkin and rubbed at his cheek, then stared at the bloody smear on the cloth.

“Do you truly want rivers of blood?” Stoner asked, his voice as cold and hard as a stiletto of ice.

A flow of blood cascaded from both of Temujin’s eyes. He gave out a strangled cry and reached for the medallion on his chest.

Stoner said nothing, yet Temujin’s hands froze in midair. He squeezed his eyes shut, but they streamed blood nevertheless.

“I can’t see!” he screamed. “I’m blind!”

Baker jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over backward. Stoner froze him with a glance. An Linh sat in horrified silence next to him. Markov’s face looked ashen, and Jo gripped Stoner’s shoulder as if she would fall to the floor if she didn’t have his support.

“Yes, you are blind,” said Stoner to the mammoth Oriental. “You have been blind for many years.”

Still the blood flowed from Temujin’s eyes. It streaked down his jungle camouflage fatigues, over his gold medallion, dark stains spattering, growing, puddling against the mottled greens.

“You tell us that you direct the World Liberation Movement,” Stoner said to him, “yet you know that you are little more than a tool for others. Your weapons, your technology, your money all come from outside sources. You have told us that the governments of Russia and China have been helpful to you. Who else has helped you? Where does the bulk of your resources come from?”

“I can’t see!” Temujin shrieked. “I can’t see!”

“Your eyes will heal,” Stoner said coldly. “In time you will be able to see again. If you tell me where your resources come from.”

“I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you….”

“Good. The bleeding will stop in a few moments. Keep your eyes closed. And speak.”

“Most of our weapons and technology…most of our money…is contributed by sources in the West. Europe and America.”

“They come from one single source, don’t they?” Stoner prodded.

“No. From many. Arms from Czechoslovakia. Computer systems from Japan. Aircraft from the United States.”

“And the money? The money to bribe air traffic controllers in the Soviet Union? The money to keep officials in the Kremlin and the Pentagon and the Forbidden City feeding you information and assistance? The money to feed and clothe your troops? Where does that come from?”

“Zurich,” Temujin gasped. He pressed his hands to his face. “London. New York. Sydney.”

“Who provides these resources? Do they come from one single entity or from many?”

“Many! The hard-liners in Moscow and Beijing—and Washington. The government officials who do not agree with their leaders’ policies of peaceful coexistence. Revolutionary groups everywhere. Muslims, Filipinos, Irish, Argentines—they exist in every part of the world.”

“But they’re not poor, downtrodden peasants, are they?” Stoner demanded. “The poor and the weak couldn’t give you any help, except for their expendable bodies. The people who supply your resources are important people, high officials in governments and global corporations, aren’t they?”