"It has to do with that story you broadcast a while ago," Jonders said abruptly. He looked at Payne, but seemed not to see; he pressed his lips together, concentrating. "It's hard, damn it—to know where to start. There are . . . issues . . . that must be handled with extreme delicacy."
What else is new? Payne thought. Aloud, he said, "I understand."
"I wonder if you do. I could lose my job and my clearance just for talking to you."
Payne tried to reassure him. "I can give you complete confidentiality."
Jonders worried his lips between thumb and knuckle. "Has to be more than that. It has to be—what do you call it—deep background? You can't go on the air with it, not with just me as your source. You must
never
use my name.
Ever
. I'm just trying to steer you in the direction of something. You'll have to do the rest on your own."
"But you think it's an important story."
"Vital. Absolutely. But you'll have to dig. I can only give you part of it."
Payne was silent. He wasn't surprised; but perhaps it was an indication of the explosive potential of the story, that he was so dependent on people who had to risk their own positions to give him information. Alvarest, Chang, individuals at the space station whose names he didn't even know—and now Jonders. Unfortunately, none of them could, or would, be quoted on the record; and yet it was that hard information that he needed. He'd hoped that Jonders might be the one. Still, a source who could offer directions and clues was better than no source at all. Perhaps in time, if cultivated . . .
Jonders was watching him, waiting.
Payne nodded in acquiescence. "I do appreciate your position. I won't use your name—"
"Or use me as a primary source—"
He inclined his head in agreement, then hmm'd, as though a thought had just occurred to him. "Would you be willing to confirm information I get elsewhere?"
Jonders pursed his lips. "Possibly. But don't call me at work again. Or at home." Jonders rested his chin on his fist with a look of concentration. When he turned his head, his eyes seemed hooded, and yet burning with intensity. "Enough dancing. You asked me once before about a woman named Mozy . . ."
* * *
They talked for a time, and then were silent for a time, listening to the wind, moving their heads only to watch a squirrel scrabbling up a tree, and a bird fluttering its wings overhead. Payne shivered; it was cool sitting on the ground, under the cover of the trees, but that wasn't the reason. Jonders had told him far more than he'd hoped for—enough to stun and horrify him. The tale was incomplete; but what a tale. "A terrible way to die," he said softly. "The police report was rather—"
"You saw it?"
He nodded. "The obituary came up on my news scan yesterday, and I checked the official report.
Vague
, was the word I was going to use."
"To put it mildly."
Payne pressed his palms together in front of his lips, thinking. "It would seem that there's something of a cover-up going on. Wouldn't you say?" Jonders raised his eyes, shrugged. "Well, come on. A 'lab accident'? The police have to be cooperating to keep it quiet." There was still no reaction from Jonders. Payne fished a little more. "What about the family? How have they reacted?"
"I don't know."
"You must know something. Haven't they been told?"
Jonders shifted uneasily. "Yes. But apparently they have other problems, as well. The father's dying, the mother is ill and can't travel. And it seems they were not a close family to begin with."
"Convenient," Payne said laconically, tapping his fingers on the recorder. "That means they won't come out to investigate, and the whole thing can get swept under."
"Jesus!" Jonders snapped. "You talk as though it were planned that way."
Payne was silent a moment. "Sorry." He scratched his cheek. "But have they been told the whole truth?"
Shake of Jonders's head.
"Isn't that a little—
insensitive
, shall we say?"
Jonders turned slowly, anger searing in his eyes. For several heartbeats, their eyes were locked in silent tension, Payne hesitating, wondering whether to go the limit, to see how far Jonders could be pushed. Then Jonders looked away, and Payne realized that the anger had not been directed at him, but at those who were covering up the circumstances of Mozy's death. Was there a way to use that anger? Be careful, or you'll lose him, he thought. What's the key here—what do you most want to know about? The project.
He cleared his throat. "How sure are you that she's dead?" he asked softly.
Jonders whirled in astonishment.
"How dead does she have to be?"
"I meant—in the computer."
"Oh." Jonders sighed. "About as sure as we can be. The spacecraft's dead. No telemetry—radio, tachyon, or otherwise. That's unofficial.
Very
unofficial."
Payne jotted some notes and thought about what
Father Sky
might have been doing at the time of
its
death. Jonders had refused to specify. "What," he said, trying to think how to phrase the question. Jonders looked up at him. "What
can
you tell me about the project?"
Jonders stared, his eyes dark, lined with worry.
"You're concerned about saying too much?"
Jonders grunted.
"But you've told me a great deal, and I just want to clarify. May I at least ask you some questions?"
Jonders gazed silently at his pine cone. He looked up. "Tell me what you already know."
Words crowded into Payne's throat, and caught. How to answer? He was asking Jonders to be forthright, wasn't he? "Your mission was to contact an extraterrestrial intelligence," he said.
Jonders looked away. "No," he growled.
"No?"
Jonders's face turned dark, almost sullen. "I mean—don't ask. I can't tell you anything about that."
"You're not denying it, then."
"I'm not saying
anything
about it." Jonders would not meet his eyes. "Ask something else, dammit."
Payne nodded, and his fingers danced, jotting notes. "This linkup procedure—" Ask some easy ones.
"I can't tell you much."
"Is that classified, too?" Payne showed surprise, though he felt none. "The procedure?"
Nod.
"More so than the part about Mozy?"
A long silence. Then Jonders said grudgingly, "That was different. You don't need to know details of the linkup to understand what happened to Mozy."
He's not going to budge, Payne thought. He'll talk about the girl, but not the mission. Stakes are too large. Pitch another soft one. "How about in general terms? The state of the art?"
Jonders shrugged. "What can I tell you? A subject's mind is linked directly into a computer matrix, and through that to another human mind."
"You told me that already. What does it
feel
like."
Jonders glared. "That's classified."
Payne arched his eyebrows and nodded. Another note.
* * *
"What will the follow-up be?"
Talk
, damn it.
Blank expression. Jonders's eyes watching him, watching
him
struggle.
"To the mission, I mean. If
Father Sky
is dead, there'll have to be a follow-up. To investigate the—" fluttering of hand— "thing. Whatever. It isn't the sort of thing you ignore, or forget about, or hope it'll go away." The eyes watched him, glanced away, not biting. Try the hardball. "Look. An alien contact—I know, you didn't say that—but a first contact with life from another star would be an absolutely incredible and unprecedented—"
Jonders reacted sharply, cutting him off. "And dangerous—"
Payne paused in satisfaction. "So. There'll have to be a follow-up. Military?"
"I don't know."
Payne studied him, the unease, the awkwardness reflected in the eyes. "Don't know? Or can't say?"
Jonders poked at the ground, spilled dried pine needles from one hand into the other. "Both, maybe." He looked up. "I can guess. But no, I really don't know." He shrugged and gazed out toward the water, and Payne thought that he saw there, in those eyes, anguish far above any concern over being caught talking to a newsman.
That gave Payne another idea.
* * *
"Would you like to meet her?"
Jonders turned. He was on his feet, pacing nervously. "Who?"
"Denine. My friend—Mozy's old friend, her best friend, really. She—I expect she'll be coming out to help straighten up Mozy's affairs. She was closer at one time than Mozy's own family."
Jonders narrowed his gaze in alarm. "You aren't going to tell her what I've told you!"
"No, no," Payne said hastily. "That was in strictest confidence. Still—it's going to be hard on her—"
Jonders was watching him with a
so what?
expression.
Make the connection, now; don't let him get away. "I guess I thought—I think—you cared about what happened to Mozy," Payne said carefully. "Denine did, too—very much so. I thought, as one friend to another, you might like to meet her. That's all."
Jonders stood with his feet apart, rocking forward and backward, the uncertainty evident in his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know. Perhaps I would . . . perhaps."
* * *
The marina attendant secured Jonders's boat alongside the other rentals, and waved Jonders toward the office, where a bored young man handed him a receipt. Pocketing the slip of paper, Jonders paused on his way out to gaze across the lake. Several boats were moving about in the distance. Had Payne already returned to the other marina, on the far side of the lake? he wondered. And had he, Jonders, been paranoid to arrange a meeting in such an obscure location? It certainly had the touch of melodrama; but he was more concerned about being observed than being thought silly. There was always a risk. Suppose that security fellow Delarizzo had put a tail on him.
And suppose you worry yourself into the grave, he chided himself. He shrugged and walked to his car.
It was a forty-five minute drive back into New Phoenix, but he hardly noticed the Saturday traffic engulfing him, as he thought about the last hours. There was no going back. If the lab found out, his career was finished. But he could not have lived with keeping silent, watching the cover-up of Mozy's death. As for the aliens . . . that was one he was not prepared to risk yet. It was too large a story—the impact could be tremendous—and if he laid out part of it, he might as well tell it all. Truthfully, he hoped that Payne would succeed in uncovering it—but not with leaks from him. A more immediate question was what to do about meeting this girl Denine. It was asking trouble; and Payne's manipulation had been transparent. Still, he felt drawn to the idea. By guilt? Or a genuine caring for Mozy? He would have to decide by Tuesday, when he was to call Payne.
* * *
By dinnertime, he was learning to live with his anxiety and was doing better, he thought, at not letting it show. After supper, with the girls off to friends' houses, he sat watching the news with Marie as she corrected student essays; and he nearly, for a time, put the entire business out of his thoughts.
Or he did, until the news shifted to GEO-Four, and a network story about a spacecraft being readied for a deep-space mission. The purpose of the mission was unrevealed, but several disquieting questions were posed by the reporter.
Marie turned an inquiring gaze upon him, but he could only shrug helplessly. He could make a guess, but he realized with a cold feeling of emptiness that he had told Payne the truth; he was as much in the dark as anyone.
"I'm sorry, John—what did you say?" Johanson spun slowly in midair, turning from the viewport where he had been watching the activity around the habitat cluster. It was a beehive outside, metal construction drones floating among tethered bubbles, bright against space. Inside, Irwin's apartment was cramped, dark, and cloistered.
Irwin, in the opposite corner of the compartment, scowled and snapped on a tiny computer buried among bungee-corded bookshelves. "I wish you'd listen when I'm talking to you," he said irritably.
"I said I'm sorry. It's been a long day."
"You're blocking, Robert. You think you've had a hard day? Wait." Irwin squinted at the screen and tapped the keyboard.
Johanson waited, fatigue deadening his body. He had just come off a long shift, with too little sleep beforehand. Irwin cleared his throat and said, "According to a source at GEO-Four,
Aquarius
is going out armed with thermonuclear warheads." His fingers paused at the keys, and he looked toward Johanson, his eyes sober and haunted behind his spectacles.
For a moment, Johanson could hardly react. He experienced shock, and simultaneously the thought that he should not be shocked. After all, if
Aquarius
was a manned ship going to do what the unmanned
Father Sky
had failed to do, and going in secret, then clearly it was a military operation. But still . . . there were laws, and ethics.
Nuclear warheads?
He let go of the window ledge and drifted slowly toward Irwin, filled with a feeling of unreality. "Are you sure?"
Irwin turned back to his screen. "It hasn't been confirmed. That's our next problem." Irwin removed his glasses and polished them. He was a scholarly man, slight and wiry, who always seemed vaguely out of place bobbing from a toehold in zero-gravity. He looked too delicate, and with his greying hair, too old, to be living in the spartan quarters of the scientists' homestead cluster—and yet here he had lived for years, even after losing his position as chief physicist at Tachylab. Irwin held his glasses before the light and blew them free of lint. "I want you to talk to the others. We've got to find a way to confirm it." He replaced his glasses and stared at Johanson.
"Great. How?"
Irwin ignored the question, turning back to the computer. "Did you know, Robert, that 'Aquarius' was a name given in popular culture to a new age that many believed was dawning, some sixty or seventy years ago? It was to be an age of peace and trust. It was a reference to the astrological sign, but in its time, many took it seriously."