Voyagers II - The Alien Within (26 page)

“What about the north?” he heard himself ask. “Algeria, Libya, Egypt, and the rest?”

“In time, Mr. Baker,” said Temujin, the greenish glow from the screens casting a weird light on his hairless face. “In time. Our agents are already burrowing into the governments there. Soon enough we may be able to proclaim a Pan-Arabic union that stretches from Pakistan to Morocco, from the Hindu Kush to Gibraltar, all loyal to the World Liberation Movement.”

“And what then?”

“Asia, Mr. Baker. My own homeland. And once we have the industrial power of China, India, and Japan behind us, Europe and the Americas will fall to us at last.”

For the first time, Baker saw in his mind’s eye the slaughter of millions. Men, women, and children. White men. White women. White children. It couldn’t be helped. It was as inevitable as the centuries of exploitation that the whites had foisted on the rest of the world.

But he said, “Australia will join the Movement peacefully, willingly. I’ll see to that.”

Temujin looked suddenly thoughtful. “That would be a great help to us, Mr. Baker. It would be a significant achievement.”

“Then let me return to Australia and start the Movement there.”

Raising one finger, Temujin said, “Yes. I will. After you have performed one task for me—or rather, for the Movement.”

“What task?”

“The woman you were with in Hawaii, and then in Paris…”

“An Linh?”

“Miss Laguerre, yes. She is with the astronaut, Stoner.”

“She’s alive?” Baker felt a thrill of hope race through him.

“Not only alive, but accompanying Stoner. They were nearly killed in a village in Chad, but our people have reliably reported them in a refugee camp near the border between Zaire and Kenya.”

“What are they doing in Africa?”

“You can ask them that when you see them,” said Temujin. “I want you to find them and bring them to me. It is especially important that Stoner be delivered to our hands. Do you understand that, Mr. Baker? Especially important!”

From the windows of his penthouse apartment, Everett Nillson could see all of Boston spread out before him: the airport and the harbor, the clustered towers of the downtown financial district and the stately row houses of Back Bay, the gleaming golden dome of the state capitol and spire of the Old North Church, where lanterns had once been placed to alert Paul Revere.

A miniature city, Nillson thought, gazing down upon it. Founded by religious bigots, seething with rebellion, steeped for two centuries in greed and petty corruption and racial tensions. Yet still a vital, vigorous city, an exciting place to be. Far better than New York, that dying, sprawling dinosaur where danger lurks on every street. Boston was a livable city.

No, he corrected himself, a
buyable
city. A man of means could control Boston through a few key politicians and civic leaders. Money and flattery, and the skill to use them both to best effect, could deliver a city such as Boston into a clever man’s grasp. New York was too big to buy outright, the best you could do was to carve out a fiefdom. Boston you could own entire.

“Excuse me, sir.”

He turned from the windows at the soft sound of his servant’s voice. She was a lovely thing, not quite nineteen, with limpid doe’s eyes and the lithe, tempting figure of an artist’s model. Something about her brown eyes and dark hair had reminded him of Jo when he had first seen her. But she had none of his wife’s spirit—or intelligence. She was a placid animal, part purring cat, part innocent child.

“What is it?” he snapped.

Her eyes widened. Nillson enjoyed seeing a flash of fear in her.

“Mr. Madigan is here.”

“Good. Send him in. No interruptions.”

“Yes, sir.”

She walked quickly past the long sectional sofa, skirted the sunken area around the fireplace, and opened the door to let Madigan in. She gave Nillson a fleeting, half-worried smile and then closed the door, leaving the two men alone.

“You’ve changed the decor,” Madigan said as he crossed the room toward his boss.

“I have it changed after every visit here,” Nillson said. “Before it gets boring.”

“Looks great.”

Nillson remained standing at the windows, so Madigan stayed on his feet, too. The marble bar in the room’s far corner was fully stocked, and both men knew it, but Nillson offered nothing and his lawyer knew better than to ask.

“Well,” Nillson snapped, “where is he?”

“Baker’s on his way to Africa. He stayed in Colombo exactly sixty-three hours, give or take a couple of minutes, and then took a commercial jet flight to Mombasa.”

“And from there?”

“The plane hasn’t landed yet!”

Nillson grimaced impatiently. “So the tracker is working right.”

“Perfectly. The satellite picks up the signal clear as a bell,” Madigan replied with a smile.

“And you’re certain that you’re tracking Baker and not some decoy.”

Tapping his own chest, Madigan said, “That microchip is buried in his thorax. You watched the surgery yourself, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Madigan shrugged and continued, “Anyway, he doesn’t know it’s in him, and the signal is at a frequency that nobody’s going to pick up unless they’ve got the special kind of receiving equipment we have in the satellite.”

“It didn’t work with Stoner,” said Nillson.

“His was sprayed on his skin. Somehow Stoner turned it off, or more likely the stuff just malfunctioned. But it’s working loud and clear on Baker.”

Nillson turned away from the lawyer and gazed out the window again. The sun was going down, the concrete ribbons of expressways that sliced through the city were jammed with cars. Ants, Nillson thought. Mindless ants scurrying along on tasks they barely comprehend.

“Apparently the people running this World Liberation Movement think Stoner’s still alive,” Madigan volunteered.

“And the girl?”

“I don’t know. I got a call from her when they were both in Avignon. Since then, not a word. Nothing but that report from our man inside the Peacekeepers, and I still don’t think it was very reliable.”

Nillson saw Madigan’s reflection in the window: serious, carefully dressed, straining to please, as tense as a man juggling vials of nitroglycerin.

“Do you think he’s still alive?” Nillson asked at last.

“If he is, we ought to recapture him. He’s no use to us dead.”

“But he’s no use to anyone else dead, either.”

“He could help us….”

“He could help the others more.”

Madigan fidgeted for a moment, obviously wondering if he dared to say what he wanted to. Finally he made his decision.

“Everett, your wife has given up hope about Stoner. If she’s convinced he’s dead, then…”

Nillson turned to face the lawyer. “Archie, I’ve given this problem of the astronaut a great deal of thought. I’ve considered the problem from every possible angle.”

Madigan said nothing. He merely stood where he was, almost like a soldier at attention.

“At first,” Nillson elaborated, “I thought that our Mr. Stoner was the key to immortality. Worth billions to Vanguard Industries. And to each of us, personally. That would have included you, too, Archie. Immortality!”

“Would have?” Madigan asked.

Ignoring him, Nillson went on, “But then I began to realize that his case was unusual. Unique. Perhaps reviving him from cryonic suspension did
not
mean that ordinary human beings could be frozen and then revived successfully.”

He moved carefully across the carpeting and down the three steps to the sunken area before the dark fireplace. “Ahh, but then I realized that if the alien had entered Stoner’s mind enough to help him through the freezing, there must be uncountable treasures stored inside his brain! The things he must know! An entire alien civilization! All that technology! The energy shields and fusion power plants must be child’s play to such a mind!”

Madigan nodded vigorously. “That’s what I think, too. That’s why it’s so important that we find him and—”

Nillson silenced him with a curt gesture. “Wrong, Archie. It’s a trap.”

“A trap?”

“Think a moment,” Nillson said, almost in a whisper. “Try to follow the line of reasoning. If the alien is inside Stoner’s mind, it must be for a reason. Right? Everything has a cause, a reason, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so, yes,” the lawyer answered slowly, reluctantly.

“Then what is the reason for the alien’s being inside Stoner’s mind? Why did the alien come here, to Earth? What is the
reason
, Archie? The
reason
!”

Madigan blinked and stared at Nillson. The man’s ice-pale eyes burned with a light he had never seen before.

“The alien came here for a purpose,” Nillson insisted. “It picked out this one planet from all the worlds of the universe. It came here
deliberately
.”

“But that’s not—”

“Don’t tell me what the scientists say!” Nillson snapped. “What do they know? The alien came here deliberately. It has invaded Stoner’s mind. Deliberately! It is in contact with the rest of its kind. There’s no doubt of it.”

“In contact?” Madigan’s voice was hollow.

“Of course! It’s a scout, Archie. It’s come here to prepare the way for the invasion. It’s turned Stoner into a Judas goat, a traitor to his own species, an agent for the alien invaders!”

Madigan gaped at Vanguard’s board chairman. He’s gone crazy, he told himself. Great God in heaven, he’s gone completely out of his mind.

Nillson leaned against the white brick of the fireplace, tilted his head back until it rested against the wall. “He’s dangerous, Archie. This man Stoner is dangerous. He’s a Judas goat. He’ll betray the whole human race to the aliens.”

Madigan staggered a few steps backward.

“If he’s still alive, if Baker finds him—kill him!” Nillson commanded.

“But he could be worth—”

“I know what he’s worth. This goes beyond profits. It even goes beyond my personal hopes for immortality. He must be killed. Eliminated. There’s nothing personal in this, Archie. I’m doing this for the good of the human race. I want him killed.”

Calling it a refugee camp was both an exaggeration and an understatement.

It was a clearing in the woods where a dozen huge olive-drab tents had been erected months earlier by the International Red Cross to shelter a medical relief team. Within days the clean, neatly dressed, professional doctors and nurses and technicians were inundated by a flood of miserable, starving, sick and wounded people. They poured into the camp, seeking food and safety from the war that had torn apart their homes and their lives. Mothers carried dead babies in their arms, begging the doctors for help, while other women squatted on ground worn bare by the press of humanity to deliver new babies to a world of starvation and disease. Men carried their aged fathers on their backs for a hundred miles to reach the camp. Children wandered in alone, hungry, crying, skins erupting with festering sores, not knowing where their families were, frightened and confused.

But they found the camp. More and more of them. No matter the flies, the sicknesses, the crowding. The tide rolled in endlessly, overwhelming everything in its path. Now the dead and dying lay side by side in the pitiless sun, jammed together so tightly that the haggard, red-eyed medical workers had learned to step over bodies as normally as they had once learned to walk.

And still they came. The numbers of refugees outran the camp’s computer. They poured in, led by rumors of food and shelter and, above all, safety. The food ran out. The water supply, from a respectable stream meandering through the clearing, turned foul from pollution. Helicopters came daily, hovering like impatient birds while the able cleared the landing area of infirm bodies who had collapsed there during the night because there was no other space to lie down.

The worst rat-infested slums of the dirtiest, most crowded cities in the world were luxurious compared to the camp. The inflow of refugees spilled beyond the limits of the clearing. People slept in the trees, among the bushes, and awoke covered with ants or infested with vermin. There were snakes in the bush, too, and some never woke at all.

Disease swept the camp. Dysentery came first, then cholera and a virulent form of whooping cough. But no matter how many died, more came to replace them. The camp swelled like an unlanced boil, fed by the precarious trickle of supplies helicoptered in from a world as distant and alien to the refugees as another star.

“I was born in a camp like this,” An Linh said wearily. “How ironic to die here.”

“You’re not going to die,” Stoner told her. “In another few days you’ll be strong enough to leave.”

If, he added silently, your wound doesn’t get infected again. And if we can get enough food to give us the strength to walk out of here.

They had both lost a great deal of weight. An Linh looked frail now, her face gaunt, hollow-cheeked, her eyes sunken behind dark rings. Stoner’s beard was full and black, his tall frame rail thin, his clothes hanging loosely on him. He felt tired, always tired, and his mind was numb with the unending misery that stretched out in every direction around him.

An Linh was lying on a cot under the welcome shade of a soaring, spreading acacia tree at the edge of the clearing. Not a square foot of ground was visible, bodies were packed so tightly, some moving feebly, calling weakly for water or help, most of them as still as death under the relentless sun. Not a breath of air moved in the blistering afternoon. Stoner leaned his head back against the bole of the tree and closed his eyes. He heard the incessant hum of flies. And babies crying. Some squalled bitterly, most were too weak to make much noise. But there were always babies crying.

So this is what war is like, he thought. The battles are over quickly, but the misery goes on forever.

The thrumming beat of a helicopter broke the afternoon stillness. An Linh looked up toward the blazing sky.

“I’ll go help clear out the landing area,” Stoner said, climbing slowly to his feet. “You stay here and rest.”

It was an irony of the camp that a beautiful young woman was safer there than in any civilized place in the world. There had been thefts and even a few rapes when the camp had first been set up. But the refugees were too weak to molest each other now. They had nothing left to steal. Even the meager supplies of food that the helicopters brought were eaten so quickly that only the flies had time to steal any.

Stoner had been helping in any way he could, despite the growing exhaustion brought on by hunger: assisting the medical teams, digging latrines, chopping trees for firewood to cremate the dead. Regardless of religion or custom, all the dead were burned. Every evening there was a huge pyre. No room in the area for burials. And starving people might dig up buried bodies, regardless of the risk of infection.

Will we die here? Stoner asked himself as he lifted dead and dying bodies from the helicopter pad. They were light as birds, and as frail. Nothing but bones and bloated bellies. And flies. Coated with flies. Stoner thought that the flies on some of the bodies weighed more than the body itself.

An Linh thinks it’s ironic to die in the kind of camp where she was born. What do
you
think, he asked the other presence in his mind, about crossing all those light-years to find this world and die among starving refugees?

He received no answer. Only a sense of patient, unworried, ceaseless observation; like an automated interplanetary probe gathering data regardless of the conditions it encountered.

The helicopter hung overhead, high enough to avoid swirling up a dust storm, thundering impatiently, jinking back and forth as Stoner and the few other men who still had enough strength moved the bodies away. The sun burned down, but Stoner barely sweated. There wasn’t enough in him to generate perspiration.

Finally an area large enough for the big cargo ’copter was cleared away, and the lumbering metal beast, painted glaringly white with a huge red cross on either side, settled slowly down onto the bare ground. Stoner squinted into the dust storm the whirling rotors swirled up, wondering how long he could keep himself from demanding to the camp director that he—or at least An Linh—be evacuated to wherever the helicopters were coming from. Each day the choppers carried off the most desperate cases to a real hospital somewhere in Tanzania, according to the doctor Stoner had talked with. The medics were practicing triage, sending back to civilization only those cases who could recover if they received proper medical care.

An Linh qualified, Stoner thought. Under the pitiless logic of triage, though, the medical staff had decided that she had a fair chance of recovering right here at the camp. She would only be evacuated if she got much worse. And Stoner needed no medical attention at all. His slight leg wound had healed satisfactorily. So the camp rules dictated that they stay, while others were evacuated. But starvation and disease could kill them more quickly than the triage classifications could be changed.

Stoner knew he could talk them into letting An Linh go. And himself, if he wanted to. So far he had not tried to exert his influence over the doctors who made the decisions. So far.

The rumbling, whining roar of the helicopter died away, and its
whooshing
rotor blades slowed to a stop. In earlier days, a swarm of refugees would rush to the ’copter’s hatch. Sometimes the crew and the medical personnel had to beat them back angrily. But now hardly anyone was strong enough to exert himself. Stoner sensed, though, a thousand listless eyes at his back, staring emptily at the helicopter.

The hatch popped open and a pair of husky, well-fed young men jumped out. Both black, both in olive-drab fatigues. Stoner started helping them to unload crates of food and medicine. A smaller hatch up at the nose of the chopper swung up, and a lightweight ladder plopped down onto the dusty ground. A half-dozen men and women descended, squinting in the sunlight. They were dressed in whites.

Replacements for some of the medical team, Stoner told himself as he took the first wooden crate from one of the blacks in the hatchway and handed it to the next man in the impromptu supply line. Idly he thought that the wood would help as kindling for tonight’s pyre.

One of the young women looked familiar to him. No, not really familiar. He knew he had never seen her before, yet there was something about her….

As she walked past him, he saw the nametag clipped to her shirt pocket: Thompson.

“Elly?” he called.

She stopped and turned toward him. She looked puzzled, totally uncomprehending.

Stoner stepped out of the bucket-brigade line to face her. Yes, he could see the traces of the ten-year-old daughter he had known. Her face was fuller now, rounder. There were lines around the eyes and at the corners of her mouth that looked like tension, or fear, or perhaps even grief. And her hair, long and golden curled when she had been little, was a chestnut brown now and clipped almost as short as a man’s.

“Elly, it’s me.” He had to swallow once before he could add, “Your father.”

Her mouth dropped open. Her hands flew to her face. “You? You’re…It can’t be!”

Stoner felt incredibly awkward, like a clumsy teenager on his first date. “I guess I could use a shave,” he said lamely.

“Daddy? Are you really…?”

“It’s me all right.”

“But what are you doing here?” Her voice was the same as he had remembered it, a high-pitched squeak when she was surprised or excited.

He smiled sheepishly. “Actually, I was looking for you.”

She burst into tears and flung her arms around his neck. For an instant Stoner thought that he would start crying, too. But then he felt his body stiffen, and a wave of cold dispassion flowed through him, like ice crystallizing the water in a test tube that’s been suddenly thrust into liquid nitrogen. He felt that other presence in his mind coolly studying this new event, dissecting the relationship between father and daughter as unemotionally as a technician takes apart the components of a machine.

Damn you! Stoner raged silently. Leave me alone! Let me have my daughter to myself.

But within a couple of heartbeats even the surge of protest died away, and Stoner could examine his daughter as if she were a representative of an alien species.

She sensed it and disengaged, stepped back from him. Brushing at her tear-filled eyes, she said in a choked voice, “It’s been…so long.”

“Twenty years,” he said. It was like the voice of another creature, an automaton.

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

“They brought me back from the dead. I was frozen for eighteen years.”

“No one told us you’d been revived.”

“I know. I tried to call….”

A short, red-faced man in the same kind of white uniform as Elly’s strode up to them and barked, “Thompson! There’s work to do!”

Stoner put out his hand and touched his daughter’s tearstained cheek. It took an enormous effort of will to lift his arm.

“I’ll talk with you tonight, Elly,” he said as gently as he could. “I have work to do, too. I’ll see you tonight.”

A tumult of emotions raced across her features. Finally she nodded, lips pressed tight, and turned to follow the angry-faced man. Stoner went back to the brigade unloading supplies from the helicopter.

Late that evening, so late that the nightly pyre had burned down to embers glowering redly against the darkness, Stoner finished telling his story to his daughter. He had located her in the main medical tent after the evening meal and brought her to An Linh’s cot, leading her by the hand as they picked their way through the bodies packed so thickly on the bare ground. An Linh lay on her cot beneath the big acacia tree. Stoner and his daughter sat on the ground beside her, Stoner leaning his back against the tree’s rough solidity, Eleanor squatting cross-legged the way she used to do when she was a child.

Elly listened in silence as the light from the pyre faded. Stoner spoke as unemotionally as a computer, relating the facts of his return to life the way a chalkdust-dry instructor would report on the major events of the Industrial Revolution to a classroom full of freshmen. As the firelight dimmed and shadows darkened his daughter’s face, Stoner could no longer see her reaction to his tale. But he felt her stiffen when he mentioned the village where he and An Linh had nearly been killed.

“And you believe,” Elly asked, her own voice sounding strangely wooden, dead, “that the village was attacked because of you?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what I think,” Stoner replied.

“I agree,” said An Linh, sitting up on her cot. “There was no other reason to attack the village. It was not in a battle zone. It had no strategic value, except to challenge the Peace Enforcers.”

“Who responded just the way the attackers must have known they would react,” Stoner added. “Within a few minutes they obliterated the attacking force.”

“Yes, that’s the way they work,” Elly said, her voice still coldly distant. “Their mission is to prevent aggression by destroying the aggressors. If they are too late to prevent an attack, they will still annihilate the attackers after the fact.”

“They did that,” Stoner said fervently.

An Linh asked, “But that’s only part of their mission, isn’t it? The Peace Enforcers seemed to be teaching the villagers how to become self-sufficient.”

“The solar power system, yes,” Stoner agreed, remembering. “And the new agricultural methods they were learning.”

“And birth control,” An Linh added. “That’s the key to everything the IPF is trying to accomplish, isn’t it? You can’t raise people’s standard of living if they outpopulate their resources. Isn’t that right, Eleanor?”

But instead of answering, Stoner’s daughter asked him, “What was the name of the village? You haven’t told me its name.”

The tone of her voice sent a chill of apprehension through Stoner. In the darkness, it was like the creaking of a door that should have been locked. Or the click that might be the cocking of a pistol aimed at your heart.

“Katai,” An Linh answered. “The village was called Katai.’

Stoner heard his daughter’s breath catch. Then silence. The moments stretched agonizingly. In the darkness he could not see her face. Only the distant glowing ashes of the pyre. Elly seemed to have turned to stone, not moving, not even breathing. Stoner heard a baby crying weakly, off in the distance, and the incessant background hum of insects.