Voyagers II - The Alien Within (6 page)

“Not living with him,” she said. “I keep my own apartment.”

“But you’re sleeping with him.”

“As often as I can.”

“The Church still regards that as a sin, you realize.”

“Do you?”

He closed his eyes. “An Linh, you are the one woman in the whole of my life who’s ever made me feel a regret at having taken my vows. For me, you are a near occasion of sin.”

“Your virtue is safe with me,” she teased.

“I’m sure,” he replied. “Too bad. Such a pity.”

Inwardly, An Linh rejoiced. He was bantering with her, the pall of desperate fear that had hung over him had lifted, at least for a while. The idea of being frozen and then revived to be cured of his tumor had raised the cold hand of death from the priest’s shoulder.

And from my mother’s, An Linh told herself.

Keith Stoner closed the book he had been reading, clicked off the tiny light clamped to its cover, and placed the book atop the stack next to his waterbed. He stretched out on the utterly comfortable, softly yielding surface, sending gentle waves across it. Stoner’s room had changed. The waterbed took up a good deal of the floor space. The bed he had awakened in had been removed from the bank of sensors and monitoring instruments. Bookshelves lined the wall on either side of the waterbed, crammed with volumes of all sizes. Richards had offered Stoner an electronic reader, but Stoner preferred the paper-leafed books he was familiar with.

It had been the psychiatrist’s idea to bring in a waterbed; he said he thought it might help to relax his patient. To Stoner, the waterbed was the nearest thing to the weightlessness of orbit that could be found on Earth. He wondered if the psychiatrist hadn’t thought of the bed for that reason.

It was nearly midnight; pale moonlight slanted through the window and made a pool of silver on the tiled floor. The only other light in the room came from the ceaseless flickering curves wriggling across the display screens in the monitoring equipment that made up the room’s farther wall.

Clasping his hands behind his head, Stoner stared intently at the screens. Slowly, slowly, he smoothed the ragged curves. Heartbeat, body temperature, breathing rate, even the EEG that recorded the electrical activity of his brain—he made them slow and smooth to the point where they were reporting that Keith Stoner had at last fallen asleep.

He smiled to himself. I should have thought of this sooner. Richards is going to be pleased to see that I’ve finally had some sleep.

The only thing that had surprised him about his sleeplessness was his lack of alarm over it. It seemed totally natural for him to stay awake constantly; the need for sleep struck him as archaic, primitive. Stoner knew this was not natural, but even though he felt he should be worried, or at least concerned, he found that he was perfectly calm. Even content. There were years’ worth of books that he had always meant to read. Now he finally had the time to read them.

Hands still clasped behind his head, he looked up through the darkness at the ceiling, and the cameras behind the paneling, watching him. Darkness is no hindrance to them, he knew. They can see me as clearly as if it were daylight.

Maybe I can do something about that, too.

He got up from the bed and dressed quickly, silently, all the while concentrating on the display screens. They remained as calm as a sleeping infant’s.

He went to the section of the wall where the portal was. After watching Richards and the younger assistants who brought his meals so many times, he knew that the doorway was activated by a heat sensor set into the wall. It would be turned off now, the portal closed for the night unless there was an emergency that overrode its computer command to remain closed.

Stoner made an emergency. The screens showing his heartbeat and blood pressure suddenly sprouted jagged, urgent peaks that turned blazing red. A chorus of electronic beeps wailed as Stoner stood patiently in the middle of the room, bathed in moonlight.

The portal glowed and opened, and a flustered young technician in a white lab coat rushed in, then skidded to a stop when he saw Stoner standing there.

“Wh…what the hell’s goin’ on?” the young man sputtered. He was tall and skinny, his hair a dark unruly mop, his coat open and flapping, pockets bulging. An intern, Stoner knew at once, stuck with the midnight-to-eight-
A.M.
shift.

“Looks like a glitch in the monitoring equipment,” Stoner said calmly.

The youngster peered at the wildly fluctuating screens. “Jesus Christ! There’s a crash wagon on its way.”

With a grin, Stoner said, “You’d better tell them to relax and forget it.”

“Yeah…yeah…” The intern pulled a pencil-sized black cylinder from his shirt pocket and spoke into it. “Campbell, this is McKean. No sweat. He’s okay. The goddamned electronics are screwed up.”

Stoner heard a tinny voice squawking angrily. The intern frowned as he said into the slim communicator, “Well, then wake Healy up and tell him to check it out himself. I’m here with him and he’s perfectly okay.”

Stoner smiled back at the youngster and slid an arm around his skinny shoulders. “You got here damned fast.”

“That’s what I get paid for.”

Together they stepped through the open portal, into the corridor outside.

“I’m going out for a swim,” Stoner said. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

The intern blinked several times and knitted his brows, as if trying to remember something that kept slipping away from him.

“Why don’t you just erase the videotapes and the monitoring records for the past half hour and the next hour or so,” Stoner told him. “They’ll just be botched up anyway.”

“Yeah…I guess I should….”

“Of course. That will be the best thing to do. No need to bother Dr. Healy.”

“Right.”

Stoner left him standing there in the corridor, looking befuddled, and walked swiftly to the nearest door that led outside.

It was a beautiful night, warm and scented with flowers. The tropical breeze sighed softly as Stoner strode alone across the lawn, through the gap between two lab buildings, and out to the fence that surrounded the Vanguard complex. He scaled the fence easily, crossed the highway—deserted except for a pair of huge tandem-trailer trucks barreling along almost silently—and sprinted out onto the beach.

The moon grinned down at him lopsidedly.

Stoner took off his slipper socks and rolled up the legs of his pants to the knee. He waded calf deep in the gentle surf, feeling the cool, delicious touch of the world ocean.

The eternal sea, he thought, bending down to scoop up a handful of salt water. It glowed slightly in his palm, reflecting the moonlight. Life began in the sea, Stoner said to himself. Did it begin that way on your world, too? Are there oceans on the planet of your birth?

He let the water drain from his hand as he turned his face up toward the heavens. There were few stars to see in the moon-bright sky. But several very bright ones hovered almost straight overhead. Space stations, Stoner realized. Looking back at the moon, he saw dots of light here and there on its mottled face. They’ve built bases on the moon. Big ones.

After a few minutes of stargazing he splashed back onto the sand and sank to his knees. The ocean stretched out before him, murmuring its eternal message, and beyond the horizon was the infinite span of the universe. Stoner knelt and waited, a worshiper, a supplicant, waiting for—for what?

He did not know.

Years ago he had seen the tropical sky of Kwajalein shimmering with the delicate hues of the Northern Lights. The alien’s message, the announcement of its approach. But tonight the sky was exactly the way it should be: serene and lovely, everything so precisely in its ordained place that Isaac Newton could have predicted the location of each star and planet and moon.

How did I get that boy to let me roam free outside my room? he wondered. Hypnotism? Intimidation? Magic?

Clearly it had something to do with the alien. He was different now, Stoner knew. He could feel the difference within him. He had spent more than six years frozen in that spacecraft with the dead body of the alien. In that time, something
—something—
had gotten into him, seeped through his frozen flesh, enmeshed itself deeply inside his sleeping brain.

“I am Keith Stoner,” he whispered to himself. “I am still the same man I was eighteen years ago.”

But he knew that he was not
only
that same man. Not anymore.

For nearly an hour he waited, kneeling, on the beach. Nothing happened. The surf curled in ceaselessly. The warm wind caressing his cheek carried a delicate trace of the night-blooming cereus flowers from the shrubbery up near the highway. Behind him Stoner could hear the softly powerful thrumming of occasional trucks speeding along the road. But nothing more.

He got to his feet and walked slowly, reluctantly, back to the laboratory. I’ve spent most of my life locked into one sort of cell or another, he thought.

He clambered over the fence again and trotted back toward his room. He waved to the intern, sitting sleepily in front of his monitoring screens, arms hanging from his shoulders, eyes half-closed. The portal to his room was still open. He stepped in, and the doorway glowed and became solid wall again. Stoner wondered if the intern would actually erase the tapes as he had told him to.

He almost wished he wouldn’t.

But in the morning they brought him breakfast as usual and Richards showed up almost at the instant Stoner finished his last sip of coffee.

“Good news,” the psychiatrist told him as he drew up one of the little plastic chairs. “We’re moving.”

Seated at the chair by the window, his breakfast tray resting on a rolling cart in front of him, Stoner searched the psychiatrist’s face. There was no sign that he knew about the night’s little adventure.

“Moving? Where? When?”

Touching his mustache, Richards said, “Soon. A couple of days, I should think. I’m not sure where yet, but it’ll probably be to the mainland.”

“My son lives in Los Angeles, you said. I’d like to see him.”

Richards nodded. “That can be arranged.” But his eyes were saying, later. Much later.

“Have you told them I’m…alive?” Stoner asked.

“Your children? No, not yet.”

“Don’t you think they’d like to know?”

“I’m sure they would.”

“So?”

Trying hard not to frown, Richards said, “Well…there are complications.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t sleep. And you hallucinated.”

“Even if I’m crazy, my kids have a right to know that I’m alive again.”

The psychiatrist lapsed into silence.

“Where is Jo?”

“Jo Camerata? She’s right here.”

“Yesterday you said she’s pretty important to this operation.”

“Very.”

“I’d like to see her. Today.”

“I’m not sure…”

Stoner leaned forward slightly, nudging the cart that held the remains of his breakfast. “I’d like you to call her. Now.”

Richards looked puzzled for a moment, then lifted his left arm and touched his wrist communicator. “Mrs. Nillson, please.”

Stoner felt a pang of surprise. “She’s married.”

The psychiatrist ignored his remark. He spoke to several underlings, then finally:

“Jo, he wants to see you. Today, if you have the time.”

A long hesitation. Then Stoner heard Jo’s voice reply, “Impossible today. Tomorrow. Lunch.”

Jo touched the keypad that turned off the phone. He’s finally gotten around to asking for me, she thought. I shouldn’t have agreed to see him so easily.

She leaned back in her chair and touched the controls that gently warmed and massaged her. She needed to relax, to ease the tension that had suddenly made her neck as taut as steel cables.

The morning reports had troubled her. There had been some sort of glitch in the equipment monitoring Keith. The whole system had gone haywire for nearly two hours; everything had blanked out, as if somebody had erased all the tapes. The intern on duty was being interrogated by security, but not even the polygraph had turned up anything. Jo wondered briefly about the PR director; was she up to something? Then there had been a routine entry in the perimeter security log: something or someone had brushed the outer fence. Not once. Twice. Guards had searched the area and found nothing. Probably an animal, they concluded. There had been no sign of an unauthorized entry into any of the lab buildings themselves. An animal. A dog left to wandering by itself. Or a stupid nene bird with a hurt wing.

Or Keith Stoner.

The reports had troubled her. Someone had tested the security system from the outside two nights ago. Terrorists? Kids looking for drugs? A team sent to spirit Stoner away? The system had held; whoever it had been was scared away by the time the guards got to the fence. But then last night there had been another disturbance.

And now Keith suddenly wanted to see her.

He had gotten out last night. Jo was certain of it. How he did it, she had no idea. But she knew Keith, knew what he was capable of. If he wanted to get out, he would. No one she had ever met in her life could be so determined, so utterly single-minded.

But he had returned. And now he was demanding to see her.

Two things were clear to Jo. Keith had made a mockery of this facility’s security. He would have to be moved to someplace much safer. And to keep him there, wherever she decided to put him, she would have to go with him. He would stay with her, she was sure of that. At least, for a while.

She got up from the chair and went to the bathroom adjoining her office. In the mirror over the marble sink, Jo examined herself pitilessly. Almost forty. Her face was leaner than it had been eighteen years earlier. The baby fat had been boiled away by the tough battles that had brought her to the top of Vanguard Industries. It would be a while before she needed a face lift, but there were lines at the corners of her eyes that not even cosmetics could completely hide.

She had gone to Vanguard Industries when the U.S. government failed to move swiftly enough to recover the alien spacecraft. It was coasting away from Earth, out of the solar system altogether, with Keith Stoner frozen alive aboard it.

In those days, when she had loved Keith with the wild fury of youth, she had wanted to be an astronaut. Just as he was. She would become an astronaut and lead the mission to rescue him. He was alive, she knew he was alive. He had to be returned to Earth before the spacecraft bearing him and the dead alien swept so far away on its blind wandering that it could never be recovered.

She learned soon enough that a would-be astronaut had no power, and it would take power, a great deal of power, to move the people and machines necessary for the task of rescuing Keith.

Jo learned about power. How to get it, how to use it. The dream of leading the space mission faded as she devoted her blazing energies and ruthless drive to the task she had set for herself. Through the years, as she climbed over the bodies of friends and strangers, enemies and allies, lovers and rivals, her goal remained the same, but her reasons for pursuing it subtly changed.