Voyagers III - Star Brothers (11 page)

LONDON

ENZO Massalino stared at the display screen for a long, long time. Then he rubbed at his eyes and stared at it again. His guts were churning with a frantic turmoil of conflicting emotions: the thrill of discovery, the burning tendrils of horror, the guilty pleasure of knowing that his name will be on the first paper published about this, the growing terror that this virus would kill millions before they could find a way to stop it.

If
they could find a way to stop it, he corrected himself. And his fear began to overwhelm every other thought.

He was a slight, spare man who had spent most of his life in research laboratories, always doing a competent job, never distinguishing himself, one of the faceless nameless army of researchers who stood guard over the public health.

Now the chance for immortality stared him in the face. And the chance of sudden, excruciatingly painful death. The evidence was conclusive. Fourteen cases reported from around the world: Bangkok, Cairo, Istanbul, and the latest one from Naples.

The virus attacked the victim’s digestive tract, devoured the linings of the stomach and intestines so that the victim’s own digestive juices began to eat away its internal organs. Death was quick and incredibly painful. The virus’s incubation time was apparently only a matter of hours.

Apparently it was water-borne. Thank god for that much, he said to himself. It’s not an aerial virus. You can’t catch it from sneezing or coughing.

Or can you? Plenty of water droplets in a sneeze.

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. My god, my god. We don’t know enough about this virus to even get started against it. The damned bug could wipe out the whole human race before we figure out what to do about it!

He thought about his native city of Rome, with its millions upon millions living cheek by jowl over hundreds of square miles. And the jet airliners that landed and took off from Rome’s three airports every thirty seconds, carrying microbes and viruses to and from every comer of the world. And the rocketplanes that spread their wings even farther and faster.

We’re doomed, he said to himself. The human race is doomed.

“WHEN I was an astrophysicist, long, long ago,” Stoner was saying to Ilona Lucacs, “Hungarians told strange stories about themselves.”

“Really?”

They were sitting at a candlelit table for two in the corner of a quiet restaurant not far from their hotel. It had been recommended on the list that the hotel’s computer provided. When they had entered, the maitre d’ had looked doubtfully at Stoner’s jeans and denim jacket. Stoner had smiled and apologized softly for not being in proper dinner attire. With a perplexed frown, as if he were doing something against his inner convictions, the maitre d’ muttered, “
Netu problema
,” and seated them in the corner farthest from the door.

“It was as if the Hungarians prided themselves on being sneakier than other people,” Stoner said.

“Sneakier?” Ilona’s heart-shaped face frowned slightly. “I am not sure I understand…”

She still wore the same tweed skirt and jacket as earlier in the day, although she had changed to a frillier, more feminine blouse. They were speaking in English. Stoner thought it best not to show that he could pick up Hungarian, or any other language, almost instantly.

“Sneakier,” he repeated. “For example, a Hungarian student I went to class with told me, ‘A Hungarian can go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you.’”

Comprehension lit her eyes. “Ah, yes! And the Hungarian recipe for an omelet: ‘First, steal some eggs.’”

Stoner laughed.

“The best one,” Ilona said, laughing with him, “is this: ‘If you meet a Hungarian in the street, kick him. He will know why.’”

Their waiter was a Japanese robot that was programmed to keep their wine glasses topped off. It rolled smoothly to their table, gripped the bottle of
Egri Bikaver
from their table, and neatly poured the Hungarian red wine into their balloon glasses.

“Very good wine,” Stoner commented.

“The blood of the bull,” said Ilona Lucacs. “That is what this wine is called.”

Stoner smiled at her and asked casually, “If I met you on the street and kicked you, would you know why?”

Her lioness’s eyes instantly became guarded. She replied, “Yes. Of course. I could say the same for you, could I not?”

“I’m not Hungarian.”

“But you carry your secrets within you, just as we all do.”

Leaning back in his chair, Stoner heard his star brother whisper, The secret within us is much different from the secrets of other human beings.

For a long moment neither of them said anything. The restaurant was quiet, half empty. No music, neither live nor piped in through loudspeakers. The only sounds were the clinks of dinnerware and an occasional whisper of conversation. The robot waiters stood mutely at their stations, and when they moved it was practically without any noise at all.

“Have you formed a theory in your mind about why I survived freezing when no one else has?” Stoner asked.

“A hypothesis,” she said. “You should use the proper term.”

He accepted the correction with a small nod. “I told you, it’s been a long time since I did any scientific work.”

“No, I have no hypothesis. No idea whatever why you were revived successfully when all the others failed.”

Stoner knew it was a lie. She was hiding something, and he had to find out what it was.

“As I told you,” Ilona went on, “the task of investigating you has been forced upon me. A post-doctoral student does not deny a request that comes from the president of the nation.”

That much was the truth, he sensed. But what was the rest of it?

“If you weren’t forced to study this cryonics problem,” he asked, “what work would you rather be doing?”

Her face took on a thoughtful look. “I was beginning to study ways of interfacing neurons with protein-based semiconductors.”

“Biochips?”

Nodding, “That is what some people call them, yes.”

“And the idea is to interface the biochips with the nervous system.”

“Yes,” she replied carefully. “With protein-based chips practically any electronics system can be implanted into the human body and wired directly to the brain.”

Stoner took a sip of wine. “You can carry your computer around inside your head. And your communicator with it. You can access other computers and get the information directly in your mind.”

“And the information comes as sensory data,” Ilona said, more eagerly. “You do not merely see letters and numbers, you
experience
the data, taste it, hear it, smell it.”

Stoner laughed softly. “I wonder what a quadratic equation tastes like.”

“Communications between individuals can become like mental telepathy,” Ilona said. “You can experience direct mind-to-mind linkage.”

A wisp of memory gusted through Stoner’s mind. Cavendish. The haunted, hollow-eyed British physicist who had drowned himself when they had been on Kwajalein. The old KGB had implanted electrodes in his brain’s pain center. Markov had told him the truth of it, years ago.

“It is an enormous breakthrough,” Ilona was saying, her excitement growing. “The size of the human brain has not grown since the Ice Ages. A baby’s head can be only so big, of course, otherwise it could not survive birth.”

“Neither would the mother,” Stoner said.

“Yes, certainly. With biochips, however, we can increase the
power
of the brain by connecting it electronically to computers and other information systems.”

“An evolutionary step forward,” Stoner murmured, knowing it was merely the first step toward the level where all humans shared their existence with star brothers.

“Exactly!”

“You could also use such technology to pry into people’s minds,” he cautioned. “Even control their thoughts.”

Lucacs stared at him for a long moment, her expression going from excitement to deflation to—something else. “Yes, that is true. It is also possible to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers directly. A new form of narcotic.”

“Have you tried it?”

“Direct stimulation has been going on for years,” she said. “It is one of the little vices that only an elite few researchers can indulge in.”

“Sounds like more than a little vice to me.”

“It is harmless,” she said, but her face betrayed the lightness of her tone.

There’s more to it, Stoner knew. He studied her face as she sipped at the wine, then lowered her eyes and returned her attention to the meal on the plate before her.

“A colleague?” he asked gently.

She looked up at him, her eyes alert again, alarmed.

“I have a hypothesis about you,” he said, trying to make it sound amusing, nonthreatening, “even if you don’t have one about me.”

She said nothing, but there was more than wariness in her eyes now. Deep within her, Ilona Lucacs was afraid, with the terrible feral fear of a trapped animal.

“Before your superiors sent you looking for me, you were working with a colleague—about your own age, I think—on the biochip interface problem.”

“That is true,” she said, her back stiffening.

“He has become addicted to brain stimulation, hasn’t he?”

The fork slipped out of her hand and clattered to the floor. A few of the other diners turned their heads. Their table robot rolled swiftly to the spot, deftly picked it up between two rubber-padded stainless steel fingers, and replaced it with a clean fork drawn from the silverware drawer built into its midsection.

“Hasn’t he?” Stoner probed.

Ilona Lucacs made a smile that held no trace of joy. Stoner saw a hint of anger in her gold-flecked eyes.

“You are almost correct, Dr. Stoner,” she said coldly. “Almost. But it is not my colleague who is addicted to the stimulant. It is me.”

Stoner finally recognized the expression in her tawny eyes: defiance

In Hawaii it was almost nine a.m.

Jo had slept poorly on her scramjet flight back to Hilo, and the fact that Keith had not phoned her yet did not improve her crankiness. It’s still dinnertime in Moscow, she told herself. Then she pictured her husband at dinner with that Hungarian witch and she felt her blood seething within her.

Still, when she swept into her office at the Vanguard complex on the edge of the city, she looked as sharp and fresh as on any other day in a cream-colored sleeveless camisole and ginger-brown knee-length skirt. And makeup that covered the dark rings of sleeplessness under her eyes.

She saw her reflection in the blank display screen on her office wall and thought idly that her hair was getting longer than she wanted it to be. The longer it is the more time and trouble it takes. But Keith likes it long and why the hell hasn’t he called me, it must be getting on toward midnight in Moscow.

She took in a deep breath, held it, then exhaled slowly. It should have calmed her. It did not. Looking again at her faint reflection she wondered if the time had come for cosmetic surgery. Several of her friends had undergone face-lifts and…

Nonsense! Jo dismissed the idea with a disdainful grimace. With all the toners and tighteners the Vanguard cosmetics division produces, if I ever need a face-lift I’ll fire the whole division’s staff.

Her sense of humor somewhat restored, Jo sat down in her contoured powered chair and tapped the button in its armrest that activated the comm system.

“Vic Tomasso,” she said. Then she tilted her chair back slightly and began her day’s work.

By the time she had scanned the latest figures on the pharmaceutical division’s quarterly sales, Vic Tomasso rapped lightly on her open office door and stepped in.

Jo’s office looked more like an informal sitting room than the nerve center of a powerful multinational corporation’s president. Instead of a desk, conference table, and the other imposing symbols of authority, the office was furnished with comfortable chairs and two small sofas. The wall decor could be changed at the touch of a button in the armrest of Jo’s powered chair. At the moment it was cool forest greens and earth colors.

Like the changeable decor of the office, Vic Tomasso was a chameleon. Neither especially tall nor broad-shouldered, he had worked hard since a teenager at maximizing his physical potential. Office gossip claimed he spent more time in the gym than on the job, and most of his evening hours in the beds of married women. In other times he would have been a beach boy, making his living by hanging around tourist hotels and offering a smiling youthful escort to lonely women.

Today he was a corporate executive, the staff assistant for security to the president of Vanguard Industries. Most of the world thought he was one of Jo Camerata’s handsome young men, and there was no doubt that she enjoyed having handsome young men working for her. But each of them had to have some talent for business, or no matter how handsome or eager they were, they did not last long at Vanguard.

Vic Tomasso’s real talent, beneath his perfect smile and thick wavy hair and darkly handsome face, was his ability to emulate a chameleon. For Vic Tomasso was a corporate spy.

He gave Jo his best and brightest smile as he sat on the sofa beneath the picture window that looked out on the distant Pacific. Tomasso wore a standard business outfit: collarless tunic of navy blue and light gray slacks. His shirt, though, was glittery electric blue and unbuttoned far enough to show off his muscular hairy chest.

“No jewelry today?” Jo quipped.

He grinned at her. They had a standing joke about which of them owned the more jewelry. Jo wore two gold and diamond bracelets and three rings.

“Just this today.” Tomasso pushed up the left sleeve of his tunic to reveal a heavy silver bracelet studded with turquoise.

“Navaho,” Jo said, making it sound disappointed.

“I’m in a cowboys-and-Indians mood,” he explained.

Jo did not follow his hint. Instead, she asked, “What happened in Hong Kong? What’s Hsen up to?”

Tomasso’s smile vanished. “Kruppmann was there. And Hsen’s chief of intelligence has come up with holograms of your husband.”

Jo felt a cold fist clutch at her heart. “They’ve identified him?”

“Yep. They know he visited de Sagres in Brasilia, and they figure that he’s been involved in several other affairs they don’t like.”

“Christ! I’ve got to get Keith back here where I can protect him.”

“They’re not too happy about you, either,” Tomasso said.

“I didn’t think they would be. What else? What are they planning to do now that they know?”

Running a hand through his hair, “They want to get your husband out of their way. And you, too.”

“How? What are they planning?”

Tomasso made an elaborate shrug. “Beats me. They pumped me for the site of the next board of directors meeting, then Hsen told me to come back here and wait for further instructions.”

“Do you think he suspects you’re really working for me?”

“He might, yeah, maybe.”

Jo realized she was biting her lip. She straightened up the chair. “Not a word of this to anyone,” she commanded. “No written reports. This is strictly between you and me.”

“Like always. Right.”

“We don’t know who could be leaking information to Hsen.”

“You think he’s gonna try something at the board meeting?”

“He might,” Jo said. “Maybe we’ll make it a video conference; then we won’t all have to be in the same place.”

Tomasso got to his feet, waited a moment for Jo to say more. When she did not, he walked out of her office, leaving Jo frowning in deep, desperate thought.

I’ve got to start polling the board members and find out how many Hsen’s got in his pocket. Time to start twisting arms, she told herself.

Tomasso had not told her that Hsen had asked about the layout and security systems of Jo’s house. And Jo did not think to ask herself if her corporate spy might not be a double agent.

Stoner lay naked on the hotel’s overly soft bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment. Remembering Jo’s suspicions, he wondered if there were cameras or recording devices hidden behind the smooth plaster up there. He could sense none, but that did not always mean none were there.

Absence of proof, he reminded himself, is not proof of absence. The first probes of the planet Mars did not find any traces of life there, but that didn’t mean there was no life on Mars.