Voyagers III - Star Brothers (10 page)

NEITHER Jo nor Ilona Lucacs seemed to notice that every traffic light between the hospital and the airport turned green as the Vanguard limousine approached it. They sped along the crowded Moscow avenues without stopping once. Rozmenko and the two police officers followed them in an unmarked sedan.

The effort made Stoner perspire slightly, in the air-conditioned rear seat of the limousine. He smiled inwardly to his star brother. Did you know that sharks also can detect electromagnetic fields? Yes, the alien presence replied. I know whatever you know.

You know a great deal more than I know, Stoner replied silently. But I’m learning.

His star brother said nothing, although Stoner could sense a quiet satisfaction.

Jo and Dr. Lucacs hardly exchanged five words through the ride to the airport. Stoner had decided to manipulate the traffic signals to get the trip over with before Jo’s steaming temper got the upper hand over her good sense.

Jo was staring at the TV screen, not really seeing it but fixing her eyes on it so that she did not have to look at the younger woman. Stoner saw that a Moscow ballet rehearsal was being shown: dancers in sweat-stained leotards lifting, pirouetting, leaping across a bare stage to the faint accompaniment of a solitary piano.

From her seat next to the TV console, Ilona Lucacs had to bend uncomfortably to watch the screen. But she kept her eyes fastened on it, just as Jo did. It averted the necessity to speak.

Stoner would have laughed, but he knew it would merely add to Jo’s steaming anger. His star brother noted how much the contortions of classic ballet were based on simian gestures. Especially the steps that show the crotch to the audience. If an ape did that the audience would either laugh or feel offended.

The limousine swung up the airport entrance ramp at last, then drove out to the hangar apron where the Vanguard Industries jet was waiting, a nasty dead-black beast with stovepipe scramjet engines and stubby wings that were built for speed, not looks.

Stoner walked his wife to the plane, saying, “I’ll make the funeral arrangements with Rozmenko or whoever’s in charge and phone you when it’s all set.”

“You phone me tonight,” Jo said, with some heat. “Or, better yet, I’ll call you as soon as I get home.”

“Fine.” He smiled at her.

Despite herself, she smiled back. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? Making an old woman like me jealous.”

He put his arms around her and kissed her soundly. “Next meeting of the IIA, you can flirt with Cliff Baker all you want.”

Jo made a half-strangled growling sound, then pecked another kiss on his lips and turned to the metal ladder of her plane’s hatch. Instantly a dark Mediterranean steward appeared at the hatch and extended his hand to assist her up the three steps. She turned and gave Stoner a final wave, then ducked through the hatch.

Stoner walked slowly back to the limousine, and stood beside it as the scramjet howled to shrieking life and taxied off to the runway. He waited until he saw it take off into the leaden gray Moscow sky, then got back into the limo and asked the driver to take them to Dr. Lucacs’s hotel.

“You speak very good Russian,” she said. She stayed on the jumpseat where she had been when Jo had shared the rear bench with Stoner.

“So do you.”

“It is taught in our schools. It is mandatory to know the language of our Big Brother.”

Stoner smiled at her, noting that she made no effort at all to move beside him. They rode back to the city, stopping at red lights now and then, facing each other and carrying on an utterly meaningless mundane conversation. But through the banalities, Stoner still sensed a hidden tension in Ilona Lucacs, a motivating force, an intensity that was driving her mercilessly.

When the limousine pulled up in front of the hotel, Dr. Lucacs asked, “Where are you staying?”

Stoner could have gone to the Vanguard office, near Red Square; the staff there would have put him up in one of the company’s luxury apartments. But an inner voice warned him not to be so obvious. He glanced at the hotel’s facade. Stolid featureless concrete and glass, as coldly impersonal as a stack of trays at a cafeteria, the kind of a building that only a bureaucrat could love.

“This looks as good as any,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll stay here.”

Lucacs’s tawny eyes regarded him with a mixture of amusement and youthful pity. “I doubt it, Dr. Stoner. The room clerk told me the hotel was fully booked when I checked in, and I had to show him my reservation form three times before he would allow me to register.”

The chauffeur had opened the limo’s door and was waiting on the curbside. Stoner ducked his lanky frame through and then helped Lucacs out of the car.

“I’ll give it a try anyway,” he said lightly.

The hotel lobby was neat, clean, and designed for efficiency. No chairs or couches for loafers to while away the hours. No newsstand or drug store. Nothing but a polished tile floor and unadorned concrete walls that echoed footsteps off the high ceiling. And the registration desk, a wooden counter that was built so low that even Lucacs had to stoop slightly when the sour-faced female room clerk placed her key upon it.

Stoner smiled at the clerk and asked for a room.

“We are entirely booked,” said the clerk smugly. She was a plump woman of forty or so, with reddish hair that looked slightly bedraggled after a long day of denying requests.

“Oh, you must have something open,” Stoner said.

She started to shake her head, but instead asked, “Do you have a reservation?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then there’s nothing…”

“Nothing?” Stoner interrupted, his voice velvet soft. “Are you certain?”

The woman hesitated. “Well…let me see.” She turned uncertainly toward the computer at her dimpled elbow and stared for a moment at its flickering display.

“A cancellation,” she announced after a few moments of frowning study. “You are a lucky fellow.”

Stoner smiled broadly at her. Dr. Lucacs stared with wondering eyes. With no luggage whatever, Stoner entered the elevator with Ilona Lucacs and suggested they have dinner together. She swiftly agreed.

His room was small. Its single bed was covered with gray-looking sheets and a small pile of neatly folded blankets, no two of them the same color. The furniture was heavy production line stuff, meant for utility and hard wear rather than looks. Computer terminal built into the TV. Bathroom functional, stark white. The only window looked out on an identical building, rows of windows with curtains drawn tight.

It was all clean, smelling of disinfectant and strong detergents. Stoner nodded to himself, satisfied, and sat on the only chair as he took the communicator off his wrist.

Holding it close to his mouth, he instructed the computer built into the bracelet to contact Jo. She would be somewhere near the Arctic Circle by now, on the polar route back to Hawaii.

“Keith? What’s wrong?” Even through the miniaturized speaker the anxiety in her voice came through clearly.

Smiling, “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to let you know that I’m not staying at a Vanguard apartment.”

It took almost a full second for her reply to reach him, relayed off a Vanguard satellite. “Why not?”

“A hunch. I don’t want to be so easily traced.”

“Then what about this call?”

He shrugged, even though she could not see it. “The Vanguard comm system is pretty secure, isn’t it?”

A longer delay than the relay time warranted. “I think so. But if you’re worried you ought to contact the Moscow office’s chief of security.”

“I’m not
that
worried,” he replied. “In fact, I’m not really worried at all. I’m just…following a hunch.”

“Can you tell me where you’re staying?”

Glancing at the multilingual safety instructions glowing on the TV screen, “Hotel Armand Hammer,” he answered with some surprise.

Jo laughed. It was good to hear. “Must be where they put visiting capitalists.”

“No, this is where Dr. Lucacs is staying.”

“You’re at the same hotel with
her?
”

“There’s something going on in her head that she’s not telling us about. Maybe she doesn’t know it herself, but there’s more involved here than she’s told us.”

“I’ll bet there is!”

Realizing her temper was rising, Stoner soothed, “Jo, she’s young enough to be my granddaughter.”

“And old enough to be a mother.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about on that score,” he said.

“Then why am I worried?”

Paulino Alvarado puffed nervously on his last cigarette. His clothes were a mess, he knew. With the army and police both looking for him, he had no other choice but to go to the men in the city who had first talked him into setting up the Moondust factory in his village. They had hidden him in seamy hotels and filthy shacks, moving him almost daily, giving him cigarettes and food in exchange for odd jobs.

And Moondust. Paulino had to have Moondust; the tiny gray pills were the difference between being alive and dying by inches. They let him have just enough to keep him going.

Each time he slept Paulino dreamed of the soldiers. He saw them again and again and he wept with the shame of his stupidity and cowardice.

Beyond his shame, beyond the hatred for the soldiers who had slaughtered his father and god knew who else, there was the fear. At the very bottom of Paulino Alvarado’s soul was the fundamental fear of dying, the burning terror that drove a man to do anything,
anything
in order to survive, in order to get the next one of those gray pills.

Now he sat in a shabby windowless room, filthy, unshaved, itching from the vermin that infested his clothes, knowing that he looked like a miserable worn-out peon rather than a young man with an education and a future. There was nothing in the room except the chair he sat on, some packing cartons stacked against the wall, and two doors. One from the alley, where he had come from, and the other leading to—where? Paulino wondered.

The cigarette singed his fingers and he dropped it to the bare wooden floor, scarred by countless other butts.

Waiting. The bare fluorescent lamp up on the ceiling flickered annoyingly. Paulino shut his eyes and immediately his head drooped forward. But he saw the soldiers burning, raping, killing. He snapped awake.

The other door opened and a man stood framed in the light from the room beyond. He filled the doorway: massive body, thick arms, heavy shoulders that seemed to come straight out from his ears.

“Come in here, chico,” he said in a voice as heavy and rough as his looks.

Paulino stood shakily and brushed at the filth on his shirt and slacks as he stepped uncertainly to the doorway. The roughneck stood aside so that he could enter the office.

The man behind the desk wore an elegant patterned jacket over a neatly starched pale green shirt. His mustache was thin and carefully trimmed. There was a small diamond in his left earlobe and several flashing rings on his lean, manicured fingers. On his desk, next to the telephone, was a small plastic box filled with tiny gray pills, like dirty aspirin tablets.

“It looks like you’ve had a rough time of it,” he said, in a deep baritone. “Sit down. Jorge, give him a drink.”

Paulino sputtered with the tequila, but it felt warm and strengthening inside him. The man behind the desk watched with unreadable eyes. Paulino could not help staring at the box of Moondust.

“I found out how your village was betrayed,” the man said.

Paulino stiffened with sudden anger. “Someone informed on us,” he growled.

The man behind the desk shook his head slightly. “No. It was a Peace Enforcers’ satellite. It detected the unusual heat coming from your little factory. I know how they work. They analyzed the smoke coming from your furnace and then informed the army in Lima.”

Paulino held the emptied glass in his grimy hand. It felt heavy, solid, somehow reassuring.

“The Frenchman told me that the factory was not illegal.”

“He strained the truth,” said the man behind the desk, smiling so slightly that he actually looked pained.

The Frenchman had also said that Moondust was not addictive, Paulino remembered.

“We can’t keep you here forever, hiding from the police. We have to find someplace for you to go, something for you to do.”

Paulino shifted uneasily in his chair. He felt the presence of the roughneck standing behind him like the heat from an open oven. And the pills, almost in reach.

“We must find a place for you that is safe,” the elegant man continued. “Someplace where you can make a living. I understand you have a degree in computer maintenance.”

“Yes, but…”

“We will send you to the Moon, then. As a maintenance engineer. You can help us to establish our operations there. It could be very profitable for you.”

“The…Moon?”

“Yes. The Vanguard Industries base there needs maintenance engineers. And there are several thousand potential customers there for our wares.” He smiled again. “After all, shouldn’t those who live on the Moon be able to have some Moondust?”

“The Moon,” Paulino repeated, his voice empty.

The man behind the desk nodded, and the roughneck touched Paulino’s shoulder. He got up and started for the door. But halfway there Paulino turned and begged, “Please. Just one?”

The man behind the desk pretended surprise. “Oh? The Moondust? I forgot—these are for you.” He held out the box to Paulino’s eager reaching trembling fingers. “To keep you company on your journey.”

Paulino grasped the little box in both hands, clutched it to his chest, and shuffled almost blindly back to the windowless room from which he had come. The roughneck shut the door behind him.

“He can be very useful to us up there,” said the man behind the desk, as if justifying his decision.

The roughneck gave a snort. “If he lives.”

“Even if he does not, we still get the headhunters’ fee for recruiting him.”

“He’ll never make it on the Moon,” the roughneck predicted. “Too soft. He’s hooked on the pills.”

The elegant man shrugged. “Then we will recruit someone else. And make a headhunter’s bounty off him, too.”