Voyagers II - The Alien Within (25 page)

“And how fares Mother Russia?” Jo asked as Markov settled himself in the creaking leather swivel chair behind the desk.

He scratched at his scraggly white beard with one hand while placing his teacup down on the desk.

“Russia will survive,” Markov said. “The land, the people—they will endure. But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics…” He sighed heavily.

“Is it really going to break up?”

Markov shrugged.

“After all these years,” Jo murmured. “I just don’t understand why it’s happening, Kir! Now that the burdens of nuclear weaponry have been lifted from our backs, now that your economy finally seems to be doing better.”

“This is not America, my lovely one.”

“But what’s wrong? Why are you having all these upheavals? Can’t your people tolerate prosperity? Do they
have
to be miserable?”

With a sad shake of his head, Markov gestured to the gray metal computer sitting on his desk. “There is the culprit,” he said. “One of them, at least.”

Jo frowned at him. “The computer?”

“We cannot run a modern nation without computers,” Markov said, “any more than you can run your corporation without them.”

“Yes, but…”

“But,” Markov went on, “we cannot control the people once they have computers. There are hundreds of thousands of them in the Soviet Union. Perhaps millions. People use them to communicate with each other. The government has no control over what they say, what they learn.”

“But how can that cause such problems for you?”

Markov smiled at her, but there was bitterness in it. “Dearest Jo, coming from America it is difficult for you to understand. The Soviet Union has been built on discipline, on order, on control of the people by the government. Suddenly that control weakens, perhaps evaporates altogether. It’s like suddenly giving sight to a person who has been blind all his life. He goes crazy!”

“And that’s what’s happening to your country?”

“Yes. Thanks to computers and communications satellites and all the other miracles that you of the West take for granted, the peoples of the Soviet Union have started running amok.”

“How bad is it?” Jo asked. “I mean, really?”

“It seems that nothing will placate the Moslems, short of civil war,” he said, sighing again. “The Uzbeks and Kazakhs …all of them want their own separate nations. And naturally, our Baltic friends are making the same demands.”

“But the Ukraine?”

Markov shrugged. “I am merely the head of the Academy of Sciences. I do not deal with politics.”

Jo gave him a skeptical look.

“Well, perhaps just a little,” Markov admitted.

“The betting in New York is that your government will offer the other socialist republics a commonwealth arrangement—the way the Brits handled their former colonies like Canada and Australia.”

“That is being discussed,” Markov admitted.

Jo sipped at the tea. Then, “It’s funny. I mean really funny, to laugh at.”

“What is?”

“The way everybody on Wall Street and in Washington is reacting to your problems.”

“I see nothing funny—”

Jo overrode him. “When I was a kid, everybody in the States who made more than the minimum wage was looking forward to the day when the Soviet Union fell apart.”

“Yes,” Markov murmured. “They called us an evil empire in those days.”

“But now that the Union is breaking up—they’re all scared to death. Especially the Wall Street types. They don’t want the Soviet Union to dissolve.”

“Naturally. It would interfere with their markets. They’ve learned how to deal with Moscow. Let them try trading with the Uzbeks!”

“I’m going to have to try,” Jo said. “Vanguard Industries was contracted to build the fusion power station just outside Tashkent….”

“A joint endeavor with the Soviet electrical power commission,” Markov pointed out.

“Of course. But now, nobody seems to know who’s responsible for what.”

Markov hunched forward in his chair. It made a hideous groaning creak.

“You ought to have that oiled,” Jo said.

He cocked a brow at her. “I have. I think it’s me, not the chair.”

She laughed as he tapped an outstretched finger on the keyboard of his desk computer several times.

“Call this man,” Markov said, swiveling the display screen so that she could read it. “If anyone in Tashkent can make a decision for you, he can.”

Jo nodded and spoke the name and number into her wrist communicator. “Would you call him for me, Kirill? Introduce me to him?”

“I would be happy to. But once he gets a look at you, he will be anxious to help you in any way he can. He will be like butter in your hands.” Markov thought a moment, then added, “Rancid butter.”

“That bad?”

“The political uncertainties have opened the door to unparalleled opportunities for corruption. Our devout Moslem friends may be ready to give their lives for Allah, but they are even more ready to sell anything else to the highest bidder.”

Jo took another swallow of the unsugared tea, replaced the cup on its saucer with a tiny clinking sound. Markov leaned back in the creaking chair, smiling bleakly at her. For several moments the room was silent except for the traffic sounds wafting through the French windows from the street below.

“Kirill,” Jo began, speaking slowly, hesitantly, “if it became necessary…would it be possible for me to come to Moscow…to live here for an indefinite time?”

Curiosity made Markov’s eyes go round. “Live here? In Moscow?”

“Under your protection.”

He blinked twice. Then, “You mean under the protection of the Soviet government?”

Jo nodded.

“Are you in such danger?”

“I may be.”

“But from whom? One of the most powerful women in the capitalist world, who would dare to threaten you?”

Smiling bitterly, she answered, “Someone more powerful than I am, of course.”

“I see. You prefer not to tell me.”

“It’s my husband,” Jo admitted.

Markov’s face went from curiosity to shock.

“This isn’t a marital disagreement,” she quickly added. “It involves corporate politics and global power. I think my life is in danger.”

“From your own husband.”

“Yes.”

He made a snorting little sound that might have been a halfhearted attempt at a laugh. “At my age! After a lifetime of faithful Communist zeal, one of the world’s leading capitalists seeks refuge in the Soviet Union—or what’s left of it.”

“I’m seeking shelter from a friend,” Jo said softly.

“Ah, Jo, if only you had asked me ten years ago. Or even five! We would have set the skies ablaze, the two of us.”

She smiled at her old friend. Even eighteen years ago, when they had worked together on Kwajalein, Kirill had pursued her with madly passionate rhetoric. But she had never felt threatened by him. He had an Italian attitude toward women: those who said yes to him were far less interesting than those who did not. Jo knew even then that this was a man who could be her friend without sex, despite all his amorous talk. With most men she could never be so relaxed. Sex was always a factor in every other relationship. No matter what they said, most men saw women first as sexual opportunities and only second as business associates or social friends—if then.

Markov prattled on, trying in his clumsily boyish way to amuse her, thinking that the serious expression on her face was from fear or sadness. Actually Jo was thinking that there were only two men in her life she had ever felt truly happy with. Kirill was one of them, a kindly, gentle, brilliantly clever big brother to her. The other was Keith, the man she had loved, the man she had wanted so desperately to love her.

“You are thinking about him, aren’t you?”

Jo stirred in her chair, directing her attention back to the Russian.

“I recognize that look in your eyes,” Markov said with a heavy sigh. “You were thinking about Keith.”

She looked away without replying.

“I saw him, you know.”

“You did?”

“More than a month ago. He called me from Paris and I flew there to meet him. I was under orders to return him here, but he refused to come with me.”

Looking into Markov’s eyes, Jo saw how troubled he felt.

“He’s changed, hasn’t he?” she said.

The Russian actually shuddered. “He was always a remarkable man, but now…”

Jo wondered briefly if the office were bugged, then decided she really didn’t care. “He told me that he thought the alien had somehow gotten into his mind, while he was frozen in the spacecraft.”

With a nod, Markov said, “He eluded a team of special agents. It was as if he could make himself invisible.”

“Have you tried to find him?”

“Of course. Our best information is that he went to Africa, to the region where the war is going on.”

“One of his children is married to a Peace Enforcer.”

“Yes, so we learned,” Markov said. “Our own people among the International Peacekeeping Force thought for a day or so that he might have reached a village in Chad called Katai. It was a special project of the Peace Enforcers. A model village.”

“But he wasn’t there?”

Markov shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “By the time we realized he might have been there…”

“He had gone?”

“We don’t know,” Markov said, shaking his head sadly. “The village was attacked—a senseless, stupid, pointless attack. The Peace Enforcers struck back almost immediately and wiped out the attackers, but it was too late. The entire village was annihilated.”

“And Keith?” Jo’s voice rose half an octave.

Markov threw his hands up. “We simply don’t know. The villagers were slaughtered. High-powered artillery. There was no trace of him in the ruins, but he might have been blown to pieces.”

“No,” she said, fighting down the trembling inside her. “Not Keith. He got out of it alive.”

“The official report says that none of the villagers escaped.”

“But Keith did. I know he did. He must have!”

Markov stared at her. Her fists were clenched on the arms of the chair, her whole body rigid. He asked himself silently, If Keith escaped, then where is he? Why has there been no trace of him for weeks? But he did not voice the question.

To break the tension that had suddenly made the room unbearable, Markov asked instead, “But who would have launched an attack on the village? It was utterly senseless. The village was far removed from the fighting. There was no strategic value to it.”

Jo’s fists unclenched slowly. She asked, “You said it was a model project of the International Peacekeeping Force?”

“Yes.”

“Then whoever ordered the attack wanted to humiliate the IPF.”

Markov shook his head again. “How could that be? None of the warring factions in central Africa is stupid enough to attack the IPF.”

“What makes you think it was one of the factions in the war?”

“But who else?…”

Jo closed her eyes wearily. It all made sense. The monomaniacal sense of a madman. Someone who wanted the war to drag on endlessly. Who wanted to destroy the International Peacekeeping Force. Someone who wanted to kill Keith Stoner.

“Who is it?” Markov asked again.

Jo looked at him and lied, “I don’t know.” But she knew that she would have to return to her husband. She could not seek the safe refuge that Markov was willing to give her. She had to return to Everett Nillson. If Keith was still alive, she had to prevent her husband from killing him. If Keith had died in that massacred African village, she had to avenge his murder.

Cliff Baker eyed Madigan suspiciously. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.

The lawyer shrugged, trying to make it look nonchalant. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Baker frowned. “That’s what somebody told the Trojans, and look what happened to them.”

They were walking down a shadowy underground corridor, featureless walls and floors of concrete that smelled damp and felt clammy. Dim naked bulbs dangling every fifty feet from the pipes that ran overhead were the only illumination, throwing feeble pools of light against the chilling darkness.

“Where are we, anyway? How long have I been here?” Baker demanded.

Madigan said, “That doesn’t matter.”

The Australian newsman was dressed in a gray one-piece coverall, as featureless and undecorated as death itself. Madigan, usually an impeccable dresser, was clad in a dark blue exercise suit that fit tightly at the cuffs of his wrists and ankles. He wore running shoes.

Baker stopped and grabbed at Madigan’s arm. “Hey, I want to know what’s going on!”

The lawyer pulled his arm free with a faint smile that was almost a sneer. “You’re alive and you’re getting out of here. That’s enough for you to know.”

For the span of a heartbeat they stood facing each other. Baker looked unchanged from the day he had been taken by Vanguard agents in Paris, except that his shoulder wound was completely healed. But his eyes were different: the terror and agony of his interrogation were still in them, together with a smoldering fear and the implacable hatred of a man who had been reduced to a whimpering, pleading, gibbering animal who would say anything, tell anything, betray anyone if they would just stop the pain.

Madigan looked tense. His usual smirk of world weary superiority was gone. His face was drawn tight, eyes locked on Baker’s.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m taking a huge risk, and I’m doing you the favor of your life. Don’t—”

Baker lunged at him, wedged a forearm against his windpipe, and slammed him hard against the concrete wall.

“Don’t fuck around with me,” he snarled. “I don’t care what you’re risking. Where are we? Where are we going? Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to help you!” Madigan barely could grunt the words past Baker’s choke hold on him.

“After they turned me inside out and made me spill my guts?”

“I couldn’t do anything about that.”

“How long have I been in that cell?”

Madigan’s strangled voice rasped, “Six weeks…almost seven.”

“Where are we?”

“New Jersey…old Army base…can’t breathe!”

Baker took his arm away from the lawyer’s throat but kept him pinned against the wall. “Where are we going?”

Madigan coughed, then answered, “I’ve got a car outside. You can drive it to New York City. Lose yourself there. Then you’re on your own.”

“You’re helping me to escape?”

Nodding, the lawyer said, “Nillson thinks you’re frozen. He found out your blood type and tissue samples are compatible with his. He ordered you stored away for organ replacements.”

Despite himself, Baker sagged. “Organ…Jesus Christ.”

“I don’t want to be implicated in this,” Madigan explained. “I’m helping you to get out. Take my advice and stay out! Forget you ever heard of Everett Nillson and Vanguard Industries. Get out of the country and never do anything to draw his attention to you.”

Baker’s blue eyes were fiery. “What else is there? There’s got to be more to it.”

Rubbing his throat, Madigan said, “Under interrogation, you told us about this World Liberation Movement—how it’s trying to take power away from the corporations and the industrialized nations and give it to the Third World.”

“I spilled my guts, didn’t I?”

“You told us everything you knew, which wasn’t much. Just that the organization is much better organized than we thought it was, and you do what they tell you.”

Baker gave a sardonic little chuckle. “That’s all I know. They contact me and tell me what they want me to do.”

“Once Nillson was certain that he had screwed everything you knew out of you, he gave the order to have you frozen as soon as you had recovered and your shoulder wound healed.”

“And you decided to go against him?” Baker’s angry suspicion coated his words with scalding ice.

“I’ve done a lot for him, over the years,” the lawyer said. “A lot. I even spied on his wife for him. But I’ve never broken American law. Other nations, yeah, sure. You can buy your way out or just stay out of their country. But now it’s different. He’s asking me to be a party to kidnapping and murder. On American soil. Under American jurisdiction.” He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

Baker released his hold on the lawyer. “Seems to me you’ve already been a partner to kidnapping and torture.”

“I’m helping you escape. I’m saving you from being frozen.”

“Is that murder?”

“It’s moot. Until frozen bodies are revived successfully, most courts will call it murder.”

“But the astronaut…”

“One case—maybe. There are suspicions that he wasn’t an ordinary human being.”

Baker frowned, perplexed.

“The scientists think that the astronaut might somehow have been affected by the alien spacecraft’s computer or…something, they don’t know what. But he might be different from other human beings.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know!” Madigan snapped. “This is a waste of time. You’ve got to get out of here before somebody spots that car sitting out there on the highway.”

They began moving down the tunnel again, almost at a trot.

“So you’re helping me out of the goodness of your heart, are you?” Baker said, almost with his old jauntiness.

“Just remember that I’ve helped you, if and when the time comes.”

“You want a friendly character witness at your trial.”

“Damned right.”

They could see the end of the tunnel. The buzzing sounds of highway traffic echoed off the concrete walls.

“And I want you to remember,” Baker said, “that I can get word to Nillson about who helped me to escape.”

Madigan stumbled to a halt.

“We’re now partners, my friend,” said Baker. “When I need your help, I’ll expect to get it.”

“You can’t…”

Baker gripped the lawyer’s shoulder and squeezed hard. “It’s an old Chinese custom, mate. If you save a man’s life, you are responsible for him forever.”

He let go, turned away, and sprinted out to the car that was waiting on the shoulder of the highway, leaving Madigan standing there openmouthed and rubbing his shoulder.

Four days later Cliff Baker was just outside Colombo, Sri Lanka, luxuriating in a private mansion that had once been a maharajah’s winter palace. To call it ornate would have been an understatement: each room was gaudier than the last, decorated in gold and ivory, silk draperies of blazing reds and yellows, vivid blues and purples, tables inlaid with silver, goblets dripping with precious jewels, tapestries and cushions and fountains and peacocks strutting unafraid of strangers through the lush gardens that surrounded the domed and minareted palace. A wall of living green guarded the grounds. Baker swam in the pool, ate sumptuously, slept on silk in a maharajah’s bed.

Alone. For forty-eight hours he wandered through the palace without seeing another human being. The servants were all robots, exquisitely programmed to make him comfortable and cater to his every physical need, except for sex. But they were totally unable to answer any of his questions.

It was the evening of his second day there. Baker was lounging in a heap of pillows, swathed in loose-fitting pajamas of royal blue threaded with silver. The remains of his dinner had been carried away by robots so identical that he could not tell them apart. A warm night wind wafted the draperies along the open garden doorway, bringing just a hint of salty sea tang with it. Baker held a golden, jewel-encrusted goblet in his hand. A robot stood to one side with a bottle of twenty-four-year-old unblended Scotch whisky in its grip.

“Fill ’er up again, mate!”

The robot swiveled on its trunnions and accurately poured a pony of whisky into Baker’s goblet.

“Make it a double.”

The robot complied. It was of a different design from the others, different from any robot Baker had seen before. Instead of the usual squat, utilitarian, fireplug shape, this one was a slender cylinder of gleaming stainless steel with a dozen arms folded compactly against its shaft until they were needed for some function. Like a bloody Hindu goddess, Baker thought, with all those arms.

“Make it a triple,” he ordered.

The robot’s arm did not move. “Three drinks in such a short time interval can lead to intoxication,” it said with the sultry singsong voice of an Indian woman.

“That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Intoxication? There’s nothing else to do in this bloody palace, is there? Not even TV.”

“Intoxication is to be avoided,” said the robot, almost as if it really cared.

“They had to use a woman’s voice, didn’t they? Everything under the sun in this fuckin’ Taj Mahal except a woman. Where are the dancing girls? What kind of a palace is this, anyway?”

He started to chugalug the beautiful Scotch when an entirely different voice replied, “You are unhappy with the accommodations, Mr. Baker?”

It was a man’s voice. Deep basso. Baker sputtered whisky and looked around. A very large Oriental man was standing in the doorway that led out to the garden.

Baker scrambled to his feet. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, just a bit drunkenly.

The Oriental smiled broadly and walked into the splendid room. He wore a simple khaki jumpsuit and black paratrooper boots.

“I am your host, Mr. Baker. Permit me to introduce myself. You may call me Temujin.”

He was big. Well over six feet tall and broad across the shoulders. The jumpsuit strained tightly across his chest and arms. Torso as solid as the trunk of an oak tree. Legs to match. Even his hands looked huge, heavy, powerful. At first Baker thought he was shaved bald, but then he realized that there was no hair at all on his parchment-yellow face, not even eyebrows.

“Temujin,” Baker repeated.

“Yes. That is not the name I was born to, but it is the name I have adopted.” He extended his arm, beckoning the Australian to come toward him, as he went on, “What’s in a name, Mr. Baker? In the tongues of central Asia, Temujin means, literally, Man of Steel. In the languages of the Chinese it means Supreme Man of Earth.”

“I’ve heard the name before,” Baker muttered, almost mesmerized by the whisky and the Oriental’s imposing presence.

“Indeed you have. It was the birth name of the greatest man of all history, the man you Westerners know as Genghis Khan.”

“The barbarian conqueror.”

“The Mongol emperor who ruled all men from the China Sea to the Danube River!”

Baker shook his head, trying to clear away the cobwebs. “All right, just who the hell are you, really?”

Temujin laughed heartily. “I am your host. This palace is mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yes! I hope you have been comfortable. I regret the lack of human companionship—especially women. I’m afraid that I have been testing you. I find sex to be too disconcerting, too distracting. I wanted to see if you could obey orders and remain here without the pleasant diversions that women offer.”

Oh, my God, Baker thought, a king-sized queen. Aloud, he asked, “But why was I told to come here? Why did my contact in New York give me a ticket for Sri Lanka and instructions to find this place?”

“Because I told him to,” Temujin said. “This is the headquarters from which I direct the World Liberation Movement.”

“
You
direct…?”

Sliding a powerful arm around Baker’s shoulders, Temujin said jovially, “Come, let me show you.”

He led Baker toward a massive, ornately carved pillar that supported the arch connecting the room with the hallway. It slid away as they approached, revealing an elevator shaft. The elevator door opened automatically, and Temujin gestured Baker inside.

It’s like a bloody “Arabian Nights,” Baker thought, brought up-to-date by this daffy giant gook. Temujin, he calls himself. A gay egomaniac. Mad as a hatter. No,
two
hatters, considering the blooming size of him.

An hour later, Baker was making drastic revisions in his estimation of Temujin’s sanity. The elevator led down to a deep underground chamber studded with display screens and computer consoles. It was a large room, but every square centimeter of space on its walls was covered by green-glowing screens. There were no other lights, nor any need for them. The eerie light from the screens was enough. They hummed like a hive of busy insects and occasionally beeped when new information came up. Baker felt sweat trickling under his chin and along his ribs. The hardworking computers generated enough heat to make the room feel oppressive.

“My situation room,” Temujin explained as Baker gaped at the screens lining the walls. “The location and status of every World Liberation Movement unit is tracked here. Some of the units—like that one, up in the right-hand corner—are merely single men, working alone. As you were, when you were in Hawaii, Mr. Baker. Most of the others are teams of people. Some of the teams are quite large.”

Baker spent the hour studying the screens, absorbing the information on them, while Temujin kept up a patter of self-congratulatory explanations.

“You’ve more teams in central Africa than anywhere else,” he said at last.

Temujin nodded eagerly. “That’s where the action is. There’s a war going on there, you know.”

“I’ve heard,” Baker said dryly.

“The World Liberation Movement has been able to capture the governments of four of the warring nations. And their armies. What started as a fight over food resources has been turned into a battle for control of an entire continent!”

“All of Africa?”

“Of course!” Temujin boasted. “Slowly but surely our side is winning the war in central Africa. Chad is almost taken, and the campaign for Kenya has begun. After Kenya comes Tanzania, and then the other southern nations will come over to our side.”

“South Africa?”

Temujin smiled grimly. “With all their neighbors joining the World Liberation Movement, how long do you think it will take before the blacks of South Africa join us?”