“I thought you were my friend.”
Looking up at that angelic face with its golden frame of hair, Reynaud took his hand away from Schmidt and said carefully, “I am your friend. More of a friend than those who are selling you these drugs.”
Schmidt backed away, stumbling slightly on the sandy ground. “You’re just like all the rest of them! Go away! Get away from me! Leave me alone. I know who my real friends are.”
Reynaud stood in front of his trailer as Schmidt lurched off into the night. It would be so easy to go with him, to use the drugs to seduce him. But with a resolute shake of his head the cosmologist turned in the opposite direction, toward his dinner.
I can’t help him, Reynaud told himself. I can only make things worse for him.
Jo Camerata sat glumly at the bar in the Officers’ Club, an unfinished daiquiri in front of her. It was early in the evening, the club was quiet and almost empty. McDermott was probably wondering where she was, but she just didn’t have the heart to spend another evening with the old man.
She slipped off the barstool and headed for the ladies’ room. The trio of Navy officers at the end of the bar smiled and called to her. She smiled back but kept on going.
Once inside the ladies’ room the smile vanished from her face. Jo sat in front of the cosmetics mirror and took a long look at herself. You’d better start spending more time sleeping, girl, or you’ll look like forty before you’re twenty-five.
When she came out and surveyed the club again she was suddenly filled with boredom. The same guys making the same jokes, she thought, and thinking with their balls. She went to the door and stepped out onto the dimly lit street, heading for the hotel where the single women were quartered.
“Mind if I walk you home?”
She turned and saw, in the dimness of a distant streetlamp, that it was Jeff Thompson.
“Oh, hello, Dr. Thompson.”
“Calling it a night so soon?” Thompson asked, falling in beside her.
“I’m tired,” Jo said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Have you been working all this time?”
“I dropped over to the comm center, to see if our visitor has decided to say anything to us yet.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a peep.”
“Maybe it’s trying to decipher our messages, just like we tried to decipher the radio pulses from Jupiter.”
Thompson shook his head. “I just wish it was all over and done with. I’d sure like to be back home.”
“Your wife will be coming out here soon, won’t she?”
Thompson shrugged. “Now the kids are complaining that they don’t want to miss the summer with their friends. It’s hard to uproot a family.”
Jo said nothing. They walked along the empty street side by side for several paces in silence.
Then Thompson asked, “How’s Big Mac?”
She almost laughed. “He’s old.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Jo, I never thought that…”
But she wouldn’t let him finish. “You know, Dr. Thompson, you’re the kind that would hate himself the next morning.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.” She stepped closer and kissed him, swiftly, on the cheek. “That’s the way you are, and it’s a shame. You would have been so much better for me.”
Then she turned and walked quickly down the street, toward the hotel, leaving Thompson standing there alone, smiling foolishly, wondering whether he ought to be proud of his self-control or mortified at his lack of courage.
He jammed his hands into the pockets of his slacks and walked slowly toward the BOQ, determined to call his wife despite the hour and the cost.
Markov and Stoner left the mess hall together, and saw Jo striding alone down the street.
“Ah, our fellow revolutionary,” Markov said. He hurried down the stairs and called out to her, “Jo! Miss Camerata!”
She turned and saw the two of them loping up toward her like a pair of eager teen-agers.
“Hi,” Jo said to them both.
Stoner felt suddenly awkward with Markov beside him. “Hello…”
But the Russian took her hand, kissed it and said, “And a good evening to you, my lovely lady. Your beauty outshines the stars.”
Jo giggled. Stoner felt his face go slightly red.
Tucking her arm under his own, Markov said, “Tonight we must make a request of your knowledge, your skill, your bravery.”
Keeping her voice light, Jo asked, “What are you talking about?”
“We need you to do some bootleg work for us,” Stoner said.
“What do you mean?”
As they strolled slowly down the street, Stoner began explaining his plans to her. Jo looked back and forth from him to Markov and back to Stoner again.
“Sure,” she said, “the computer stores all the tracking data from the radars. I could start a rendezvous program easily enough. But I thought that McDermott had put…”
“That thing isn’t a comet,” Stoner blurted. “It’s not a natural object at all. It’s an artifact.”
“Professor McDermott is being too narrow-minded,” Markov added. “We must prevent him from ruining the entire purpose of this project.”
“He’s afraid of it,” Jo said. “Mac wants it to be a natural object because he’s scared of what it might really be.”
Stoner shook his head. “He doesn’t have that much imagination.”
“Now, listen,” Jo insisted, “I know what goes on in his head…”
“I’ll bet you do.”
Before she could reply, Markov stepped between them. “Jo, dearest lady, I said that we needed your courage as well as your skill. And we do. This tracking data must be prepared without Professor McDermott knowing of it.”
“It’s important,” Stoner said, dropping his argument with her. “Vital.”
Jo said nothing.
“Will you help us?” Stoner asked.
“So you can fly up to this thing and meet it,” she said.
He nodded. “That’s right. You want to be an astronaut someday? Help us make contact with this bird and they’ll be hiring astronauts by the thousands.”
“Sure,” Jo said. “It’ll be a great opportunity for me. If Mac doesn’t toss us all in the slammer first.”
Stoner raised his hands in a gesture that said, It’s all up to you.
“Why a manned rendezvous mission?” Jo asked. “Why not an automated probe, like the kind that landed on Mars and Venus?”
Stoner answered quickly, “Because it takes years to build such probes. And they’re dumb. They’re just preprogrammed machines that do exactly what they’ve been programmed to do and not one damned thing more. How do you design a machine to examine something we’ve never seen before? That we know almost nothing about?”
“The object would be gone from the solar system before the committee discussions were finished,” Markov pointed out.
“But we do have manned spacecraft,” Stoner went on urgently. “NASA has its Space Shuttle. The Russians have their Soyuzes. I think there’s even a launch facility out on Johnston Island, not that far from here.”
“We also have our Salyut space station in orbit continuously with two cosmonauts aboard it. They can be sent to…”
“No,” Stoner snapped. “I’m the man who goes.”
Markov replied, “I realize that you would like to be the one to go, but…”
“No buts. We need somebody who knows what to look for. You can’t program a cosmonaut with everything he needs to know. You can’t turn a rocket jock into an astrophysicist, not in a couple of months. I’m the logical man for this mission. If you send anybody else, it’d be just as stupid as sending an automated probe with its limited programming.”