Woodenly, like a marionette jerked along by invisible strings, Cavendish stepped back to the chair beside Schmidt’s bed. Instead of sitting in it, he leaned both bony hands on the chair’s back.
A wave of pain washed over him and his knees nearly gave way.
“Stoner!” he blurted.
“What?”
Looking toward the young astronomer through pain-reddened eyes, Cavendish said, “It’s Stoner who’s at the bottom of all this.”
“Stoner? The American?”
“Yes…” Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Cavendish went on, “We’d all be home now if it weren’t for him. McDermott wanted to finish the project and send us all home, but Stoner insisted on pressing on.”
“He wants to get all the credit, doesn’t he?” Schmidt said, the old sullen pout returning to his lips.
“Yes.” It was more of a whimper than a word.
Schmidt finally noticed the old man’s pain. “What’s wrong? Are you ill?”
“Headaches,” Cavendish grated out. “I…get headaches.”
“Shall I call a doctor?”
“No. No, I’ll be all right.” Cavendish fished in the pockets of his trousers and pulled out a small plastic bottle. “They gave me pain-killers. Quite good, actually.”
Schmidt had propped himself up in the bed on one elbow. “They won’t let me have anything for the pain,” he said. “Nothing stronger than aspirin.”
Holding the bottle in front of the youngster, Cavendish repeated, “These are quite good. Non-narcotic. Non-habit-forming.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” the old man lied.
“It gets worse at night,” Schmidt said. “The pain.”
Straightening up, Cavendish said, “Perhaps it would be all right if I let you have a few of these…”
Schmidt nodded as Cavendish unscrewed the cap and shook out four pills into his trembling palm.
“You’re sure you can spare them?” Schmidt asked.
“I…can get more…”
Schmidt accepted the ovate yellow capsules, held them in his hand and looked down at them.
Cavendish’s whole body was on fire. “Try one,” he croaked. “It…will keep the pain…away.”
Schmidt hesitated only a moment, then took the cup of water next to his bed in one hand and popped a capsule into his mouth with the other. He drank and swallowed.
Within a few moments he was leaning back on the bed, glassy-eyed.
Cavendish, twitching as if electric currents were being applied to his nerve centers, came over to the bed and whispered into Schmidt’s ear:
“It’s all Stoner’s fault. If you can get up from this bed and find Stoner, you can go home again and be happy. Stoner wants to hurt you. Stoner wants to kill you. You’ve got to stop him before he kills you.”
Cavendish’s eyes widened at the words pouring from his lips. It was as if someone else were speaking, using Cavendish’s mouth as a transmitter, a machine totally disconnected from his own control.
Terrified at what was happening, he jerked away from the bed. A glance out the window told him that it was still late afternoon outside. Cavendish shambled out of Schmidt’s room, heading away from the hospital as fast as he could. He never noticed that out in the peaceful lagoon an outrigger canoe with two people in it abruptly capsized.
Chapter 32
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Billed as the “UFO Event of the Year”…UFO ’79 offered the same old cliches to an audience long familiar with the pros and cons of ufology….
Walter H. Andrus, international director of the Mutual UFO Network…told [us] that four types of aliens are looking in on us: dwarflike humanoids, human-appearing beings comparable in size to ourselves, animallike creatures, and robots….
Alan Holt, astrophysicist training supervisor at NASA…described the interaction between magnetic and electrical fields and the theory of space-time curvature as it relates to gravitational propulsion….
To sum up UFO ’79: All the papers presented seemed to cry out for the scientific community to accept UFOs. Yet despite the efforts of people like Holt, rational scientific inquiry had clearly taken a backseat to promotion by those UFO groupies who sell the notions of visitations by alien beings.
They were already soaked from the first time the outrigger had overturned. Markov paddled furiously, battering the water with uneven, choppy strokes, while Jo sat up in the bow and tried not to laugh.
“Watch out now,” she warned, “we’re getting into another channel between islands…”
Before she could finish the sentence the current caught the canoe and it started to tilt over. Markov watched helplessly as the outrigger pontoon swung up over his head and the two of them were dumped again into the bath-warm water.
He stood waist-deep in the water and felt his pockets. If anything’s lost, it’s lost forever, he knew. Then he remembered his wristwatch. It was dripping water and the crystal was fogged over, but the sweep-second hand still seemed to be moving.
“Come on, help me right it,” Jo called.
With a heavy sigh, Markov grabbed the pontoon struts and pushed the canoe right side up again. It was full of water. Laughing, Jo motioned for him to tilt the canoe enough to let most of the water out.
“I thought,” Markov said, grunting with the effort, “that these boats could not turn over. Isn’t that what the outrigger is for?”
Jo just laughed. He helped to push her back into the canoe, making certain to get a good handful of her backside in the process. Firm yet tender, he appraised.
Still grinning at him, Jo stuck out a hand. “Come on, climb back in.”
Markov surveyed the distance to the empty beach nearest them. “No thank you, I’ll walk. It’s safer.”
“Walk?”
“Wade. In fact, I will propel you to a safe harbor.”
“I thought you were afraid of sharks.”
He looked down into the perfectly clear water. “If I see a shark coming, I’m sure I can outrun him to the beach.”
He got behind the canoe and started pushing it through the water like an oversized child’s toy.
Jo clutched the gunwales and beamed at him. “My hero! Just like Humphrey Bogart in ‘The African Queen.’”
“Who?” Markov asked, sloshing through the thigh-deep water.
She gaped at him. “You never heard of Humphrey Bogart?”
“Wasn’t he Vice-president of the United States?”
As he nudged the outrigger up onto the beach, the sky darkened and unloaded another shower. Jo hopped out of the boat and helped him push it safely up on the sand. Then they ran for the cover of the trees up the beach and collapsed on the sand, wet, laughing, breathless.
“I don’t believe that I was meant for the outdoor life,” Markov observed.
“Whatever makes you say that?” Jo countered.
“I am a civilized man. That means I belong in a city, not out in this wilderness.”
“Moscow?”
He nodded. “Yes. Moscow would look very good to me right now. Providing you were there to share it with me, of course, dear one.”
“What’s it like?” Jo asked. “I’ve never been there.”
“It is a city,” Markov answered, shrugging. “Not as beautiful as Paris, nor as large as London. Not as crowded as Tokyo. The sun shines there for two whole minutes each year. Everyone rushes outdoors to witness the phenomenon. Then it gets cloudy again and it snows for the rest of the year.”
She laughed. “You love it, don’t you?”
Watching the rain gusting across the lagoon, Markov answered, “I suppose I do. I was born there. I imagine I will die there. My father died fifty kilometers to the west of Moscow, helping to hold off the Nazi invaders in nineteen forty-one. His father died in the civil war that followed the Revolution.”