Stark fear clutched Takamura’s heart. All the long years of schooling and scientific training on which he prided himself vanished from his mind. This is an evil omen, he knew. An evil omen…
Chapter 23
The day was slowly dying.
Stoner had eaten dinner with Jeff Thompson at one of Kwajalein’s three government-owned restaurants. The food was cheap and about as appetizing as its price would indicate. It was still bright daylight outside when he finished, so he returned to his office and went over the latest batch of photographs from Big Eye.
Even in the orbital telescope’s best magnification the approaching spacecraft looked like nothing more than a featureless blob of light, a tiny smudge on the picture, a whitish thumbprint set against the sharp, unchanging patterns and endless blackness of eternity.
By the time he left his office the sun was throwing spectacular swaths of red and orange across the tropical sky. Stoner walked alone down the main street, past the cinder block government buildings, heading in the general direction of the Officers’ Club.
He wondered where Jo might be, what she was doing, and an image of her in bed with McDermott filled his mind. He tried to shut it away, to forget it, to think of something else instead. He quickened his pace toward the Officers’ Club; he knew he needed company, conversation, something to erase those pictures from his mind.
“Ah, Stoner!” Cavendish was standing at the doorway of the club with a lanky, flaxen-haired, sullen-faced young man.
“I want you to meet Hans Schmidt, of the Netherlands Radio Observatory at Dwingeloo.”
Stoner put his hand out automatically. Schmidt’s grip was lukewarm.
“Dwingeloo,” Stoner said, his memory tweaked. “I saw a report a few days ago that said Dwingeloo picked up the radio pulses from Jupiter last summer.”
“That was my work,” Schmidt said in British English. “But it was classified secret by NATO.”
The young man was slightly taller than Stoner, youthfully thin. But his face was still soft with baby fat. The forehead was high, the eyes a bit puffy, the lips set into a pout. He’ll be bald before he’s thirty, Stoner thought, but he’ll still look like a kid.
“Welcome to the club,” Stoner replied. “My work got stamped secret, too.”
“Quite,” said Cavendish, laying a hand on each man’s back and gently urging them into the Officers’ Club. “Schmidt here may actually have priority on discovering the radio pulses, you know. When did your group first pick them up?”
“It wasn’t my group,” Stoner said. “I was just hired on as a consultant. You want to talk to Jeff Thompson about that.”
They went to the crowded bar and ordered. Cavendish had a brandy, Stoner a scotch and water, Schmidt a Heineken’s. The club was noisy, smoky, the best and only bar on the island. After fifteen minutes of talk, Stoner agreed that Schmidt had probably recognized the strange nature of the radio pulses earlier than Thompson had.
“So you’ll get the recognition,” Cavendish said, “once all this comes out into the open.”
That seemed to make Schmidt even more morose. “By the time all this comes into the open I’ll be an old man.”
“Oh come now, you still have a ways to go, you know.”
Schmidt drained the last of his beer and looked as if he wanted to cry.
“They’ve pushed you around, haven’t they?” Stoner said.
He nodded slowly. “I was to be engaged…. Now who knows how long I’ll be here?”
“Me too. They’ve been shoving all of us around like a pack of animals. You know how I celebrated Christmas? They let me make a phone call to my kids. One call. Like a prison inmate.”
“Couldn’t they fly your girl out here?” Cavendish asked.
“They wouldn’t let her come. And she wouldn’t do it, anyway. I asked her, but she said no. I can’t blame her…to leave her home and family and go to the end of the Earth.” He shook his head sorrowfully.
“Damned bad show,” Cavendish murmured.
“First, they destroy my thesis with their secrecy laws,” Schmidt went on, staring into his glass, “and now they exile me to this island. If I had murdered someone I would be treated better than this. If I became a terrorist and captured a train or threatened to blow up an airliner they would treat me better than this.”
Stoner said grimly, “But you’re not a terrorist. You’re a scientist. They know they can kick us around and all we’ll do is beg for another chance to do our work.”
“There is one thing,” Cavendish said slowly.
“What?” Schmidt asked.
“A thousand years from now, when human history is written, your name will go down as the first man to make contact with an intelligent extraterrestrial race.”
Stoner put his drink to his lips, saying silently to himself, No. Schmidt may have discovered the radio pulses, but I am going to be the first man to make actual contact with that alien. Or I’ll die trying.
Schmidt’s little-boy pout deepened. “What makes you think there will be a human race to write its own history a thousand years from now? Or even a hundred years from now?”
“Well, of course…”
“Suppose,” Schmidt went on, “that this spacecraft is an invader, the first scout for an alien invasion fleet that will wipe us out? How will my name be written then?”
“That’s rather farfetched, don’t you think?”
Stoner, in the middle of another swallow of his scotch, sputtered laughter into the drink. “Here we are,” he said, blinking tears from his eyes, “sitting on a godforsaken atoll in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for an alien spacecraft to get close enough for us to study it in detail, and you’re talking about something being farfetched? This whole business is farfetched!”
“H’m. Quite. But still, I don’t believe that an intelligent species goes batting about the universe with rape and pillage on its mind, do you? That’s strictly funny-book stuff.”
“Who knows?” Stoner said. “Can’t plot a trend with only one data point.”
Cavendish smiled, a bit uneasily. “Datum, dear boy. Datum is the singular of the word.”
“I stand corrected.”
The old man put his empty glass on the bar. “Getting rather late for me. I believe I’ll toddle off.” He pulled a balled-up dollar bill from his pocket and left it on the bar. “Good night.”
And just that abruptly he left Stoner and Schmidt standing at the bar. Stoner felt awkward with the younger man, who seemed content to plunge into solitary gloom.
Cavendish has stuck me with baby-sitting this kid, Stoner realized suddenly. That dirty old man!
He scanned the club, seeking a friendly face. The big room was filled with smoke and men. Noisy, drinking, laughing men who waved cigarettes and cigars at each other, playing cards, telling stories and clustering around the few women who were present. Kwajalein’s normal complement of military and civilian technicians had been tripled by the influx of Project JOVE’s scientists and staff, but the ratio of men to women was still huge.
The local merchants vote in favor of the alien, Stoner thought. The bartender isn’t worried about being invaded. Not as long as the tips keep coming.
He spotted Markov sitting at a table across the smoky room, surrounded by a mixed crew of Americans, Europeans and Russians. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.
I ought to get to know Markov better, Stoner told himself.
Glancing back at Schmidt, who was staring morosely into his second glass of beer, Stoner said, “Come on, let’s join that gang over there.”