Chapter 38

It hung in the black emptiness like a shining golden globe.

Stoner blinked as he stared out the space shuttle window. He had expected to see the small oblong shape of the alien starship surrounded by other spacecraft, like a queen bee attended by glittering metallic workers.

Instead there was a huge, smooth expanse of gleaming gold, like a gigantic polished gemstone. It shimmered subtly, and Stoner realized that it was a screen of energy that now encased the alien ship and all the human structures that had been built around it.

"It's an energy screen," Jo said.

She was sitting beside him in the shuttle's passenger cabin, dressed in the functional coveralls everyone wore in zero gravity. Hers were coral red, and they accented her figure rather than hid it. Jo's hair was neatly pulled back and tied in a little ponytail that floated weightlessly off the nape of her neck.

Stoner could not take his eyes off the gleaming ovate immensity of it. He felt the shoulder straps of his seat restraint harness cutting into him as he pressed his forehead on the cold plastic of the window.

"It must be miles wide," he said to Jo.

"Four thousand meters from end to end," she said. "Same dimension top to bottom. Almost three miles."

"More like two and a half miles." Stoner did the math in his mind. "Two point four eight something."

"But who's counting?" she joked weakly.

Markov, hovering weightlessly over their chair backs, chimed in, "I'm surprised that you don't have the metric system ingrained in your very souls. It is such a logical system, so scientific."

"We have both systems in our minds, Kirill," answered Jo. "Metric and English."

"Such confusion." The Russian wagged his head. It made him float slightly sideways, and he pressed his hand against the cabin's curving bulkhead to steady himself.

The Russian looked younger in zero gravity. The lines in his face and the pouches beneath his eyes had smoothed out.

Markov, An Linh, and Baker had all started to get sick when the Russian shuttle had coasted into zero gravity. Stoner could see their faces go white, sense the dizziness and nausea each of them was experiencing. He said a few soothing words as he reached into their minds and eased the disorien-tation that plagued them. What usually took new space travelers hours to achieve, they accomplished in minutes--an inner equilibrium. They found that they enjoyed zero gee and marveled that they had acquired their "space legs" as quickly as any veteran astronaut.

Stoner laughed inwardly at Markov's disdain of the English system of measure. Kirill's worried about the confusion of having two mathematical systems in your head. How about having two minds inside you? Two different persons in one body? He suddenly thought of his childhood Sunday school classes. God must find it even more confusing, with three persons inside.

But his eyes never left the curving wall of the energy screen, growing bigger by the moment as their shuttle approached. The huge bulk of the Earth slid into view, ponderous and incredibly bright, with deep, swirling blues and streaming swirls of dazzling white clouds. The energy screen glowed against it, big enough to blot out the subcontinent of India as it glided past.

The Indian Ocean was a wide swath of purest lapis-lazuli blue, decked with a procession of pearl-gray domed thunderclouds which cast long shadows ahead of them. Stoner saw the coast of Australia coming up, then suddenly squeezed his eyes shut against the unexpected brilliance of the island continent's interior.

"What's that?" he asked, opening his eyes again to see a vast glittering swath too bright to look at directly.

Jo leaned against him to peer out the tiny window.

"Oh," she said. "The Outback Project."

"Outback Project?"

"The Aussies are converting their desert into solarvoltaic cells. Automated machines scoop up the sand at one end and

leave solar cells on the ground on the other. They've been going on for years now; must have done several thousand square miles."

"A solar-energy farm," Stoner marveled. "Converting sunlight into electricity."

"It's not very efficient," Jo sniffed. "But trust the Aussies to think big. Australia's an electricity exporter now. Vanguard's been negotiating with them to run a power link all the way to Japan."

Stoner squinted at the glittering strips of solar cells reflecting sunlight at him like the facets of a continent-wide jewel. Then the golden-hued energy screen slid across his view, so close now that it blotted out Australia and New Zealand both as it swept by in its Earth-circling orbit.

Elly's on her way back there, Stoner thought. That tiny speck of an island is home to her now. Her children are there. She'll find a new husband, he told himself. She's a good woman, warm and intelligent and caring. Maybe someday she'll get over the hurt I've caused her. Maybe someday I can visit her in her own home.

He looked across the curving bulk of the Pacific Ocean toward the coast of California, coming into view. Douglas, he thought. Douglas.

Once they had landed in Moscow, Stoner had put through a call to Los Angeles. With Jo's help, he'd tracked down the Douglas Stoner who was his son.

Douglas was a man now, with the beginnings of pouches under his eyes and a tight, suspicious downturn at the corners of his lips. He wore a light gray jacket over a silk pullover shirt. His hair was ash blond from the sun, as was the drooping mustache that had surprised Stoner. In the background, Stoner saw a marina filled with sailboats.

Douglas stared out of the phone's picture screen with narrowed eyes, warily, as if he were facing a trap of some kind. "You're my father?" His voice was dark with suspicion.

"Underneath this beard, yes, it's me." Stoner had tried to sound light-hearted. It was a mistake.

"I don't have a father. My father's dead."

"I'm back, Doug. I've been trying to reach you to tell you--"

The thirty-three-year-old stranger reached out and snapped

off the connection. The phone screen before Stoner went suddenly blank gray.

He heard Jo's sharp intake of breath behind him, saw Markov's sad shake of head. Wordlessly, Stoner touched the button on the phone's keyboard that redialed the same number. For the span of a heartbeat he wondered what he could say to the son whom he had not seen in twenty years.

The phone screen lit up with the words "CALL REFUSED." They glowed blackly against the gray background.

Stoner hit the off button and got up from the phone. Neither Jo nor Markov said a word. He stood and waited for some feeling to hit him: anger, pain, remorse, something, anything. But there was no emotion at all. It was as if some stranger had refused to tell him the time of day.

"Well," he said to his two friends. "At least he knows I'm alive."

And he walked out of the room, leaving Jo and Markov staring at his retreating back.

Markov tugged worriedly at his thinning beard. "He frightens me."

Nodding, Jo admitted, "Me, too."

"He's not human."

"He was when he first awoke. In Hawaii ... in Italy, Keith was more human, more alive than he'd ever been."

"But now . . ."

"Now he's like a machine, almost."

The Russian sighed deeply. "Not a trace of emotion in him. Not love or fear or anger. Nothing. As cold as an iceberg."

"What he did to that Oriental, Temujin ..." Jo shuddered.

"He's not human," Markov repeated.

"He was always driven," said Jo.

"But not like this. He had emotions before. Passions. He could get drunk. He could get angry. Now--now he's like a man possessed."

She stared at the empty doorway that Stoner had left behind him. "Do you think it's really a good idea to let him go up to the alien spacecraft?"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know," Jo said, feeling the tension within her turning to actual fear. "I just think . . . maybe if he gets

in contact with that spacecraft again, with the alien and all . . ."

Markov stared at her silently.

"Maybe we ought to keep him away from it," Jo suggested.

The Russian slowly shook his head. "I don't think we could keep him away, even if we tried. I don't think there is any way we could possibly stop him from doing whatever he wants to do."

As Stoner stared at the approaching wall of energy, with the Earth reduced to a beautiful backdrop rather than a world of living, suffering people, he felt as if all the things that had happened to him since awakening had really happened to someone else. It was like watching a video biography of some stranger's life. The Earth was merely a distant place, a locale, a stage, and those strange people who inhabited it were odd characters in someone else's struggle.

Here was home. Here, in the clean, empty silence of space.

For an instant Stoner thought he might get up from his seat, go to the airlock, and step out into the void. How simple it would be. How clean and neat. I did it once, he told himself. And he felt the chill of death seeping into him. He shuddered, not from the cold, but from the conflict. Part of him wanted oblivion, an end to struggling. Part of him looked forward to returning to the cold and emptiness.

Not yet, a voice within him whispered. We have not come all this way to give it up now.

We. The voice spoke of we. The alien and I. Linked together irretrievably.

"The screen holds in air and heat, and it shields against meteoric dust, even good-sized meteors." It was Jo's voice, far in the distance. She was talking to Markov and the others.

He stared at the approaching wall of shimmering energy, and his eyes saw the sarcophagus riding against the glorious sky of the homeworld up at the top of the tower that rose into orbital space. His funeral cortege carried his body with reverence and placed it lovingly on the bier inside the sarcophagus. None of his creche mates was there, of course. Born on the same day, they had each terminated their lives on the same day, according to the ancient custom. But he was starting a new custom, something unheard-of in all the ages

of their civilization. Sending his dead body, preserved by the cold of infinity itself, off among the stars. Some called it foolishness. A few spoke of sinful pride. But he was beyond their words now. His body would ride the starways, perfectly preserved, waiting to be discovered by creatures who could understand, creatures who could care, creatures who could look to the stars and finally know.

The space shuttle thumped against an airlock, and Stoner was jarred out of his reverie.

"The airlock projects out beyond the screen," Jo was saying. "It was easier than trying to open the screen every time we wanted to dock a shuttle."

Wordlessly, Stoner unlatched his harness and rose to his feet. Stretching an arm upward, he balanced himself a few inches off the floor and eased out into the cabin's central aisle. Jo and the others were ahead of him. The shuttle was otherwise empty, except for the flight crew up in the cockpit.

The hatch swung open and a pair of technicians ducked their heads inside. One wore white coveralls with the stylized Vanguard monogram on his shoulder. The other, a chunky young woman, was in khaki coveralls that bore a hammer-and-sickle insignia.

An Linh, Baker, and Markov all wore Russian-issue coveralls, plain khaki with no shoulder patches or nametags. Stoner still wore the faded blues he had acquired from the Peacekeepers, partly because Markov could find no coveralls long enough to fit him. Jo's outfit of coral was the only touch of vivid color among the five of them.

She took an electronic stylus from the white-clad technician and signed his hand-sized display screen. The tech came aboard the shuttle as the Russian woman led them away and into the orbital complex.

Stoner saw that they were in a transparent tunnel that led toward the center of the complex. From inside, the energy screen looked a dull, flat gray. Other transparent tunnels led from different parts of the screen toward the center, with cross tunnels connecting them here and there. It reminded Stoner of a drawing he had studied in a biology class, ages ago, showing blood vessels threading through the human body.

And we're the corpuscles, he thought as they floated through the tunnel.

"These were built before the energy screen went up," Jo said, like a tour guide. "They're airtight, so they give us some redundancy if the screen should blow out."

"Blow out?" Markov's voice squeaked.

"Not to worry, Kir," said Jo, laughing. "This whole complex is built to man-rated specifications. All the safety precautions we can think of. Like the airlock coming up: these tunnels are divided into airtight segments, so if something happens in one area, the rest of the tunnel can be sealed off and kept safe."

Markov gave her an unconvinced look.

The Russian woman halted them in front of the airlock hatch.

"From this point onward there will be gravity," she said in British-accented English. "It will be very slight at first, but as we approach the center of the complex it will increase to the full value of gravity on Earth's surface."

"Gravity?" Baker asked. "How?"

"It's fairly new," Jo replied. "We've been experimenting with it for a few months now. Same principle as the energy screen, really, but here we apply the energy to create a gravity field."

Stoner watched Baker's face as the new information swirled in his mind. The Australian's mouth grinned, but his eyes were calculating. He's trying to figure out how an artificial gravity field could be used as a weapon, Stoner saw. He's picturing a city being uprooted and flung off into space.

And these are the people you're trying to save, he told himself. Savages whose first thought is always how to kill their enemies, how to increase their own power.

Why? he wondered. And looking deeper into Baker's cold eyes he saw the anger that drove the man, and the fear that lay beneath it. Strike first, Baker's fears commanded him. Hurt them before they can hurt you.

Stoner turned his eyes away from the Aussie. They went through the airlock, and within a few moments he could feel the gentle, insistent tug of gravity. An Linh's hair, which had been floating wildly in all directions like a mini-Afro, began to settle down. Jo's pony tail bobbed against her neck. Markov's face began to sag again and look its age.

Looking forward, Stoner strained for a glimpse of the alien spacecraft. But the area where all the main tunnels con-

verged was a jumbled mass of metal-walled structures. Like the holy places in the Middle East, Stoner thought. They cover over them with churches or mosques or temples. The more important the site, the bigger the structure they've built over it.

Still, he felt a tingle of anticipation as they made their way down the tunnel. From floating they went to the long-striding, half-loping walk that astronauts use in the meager gravity of the Moon. But that quickly gave way to the more solid tread of full Earthly gravity. Stoner soon heard the heavy, purposeful clicking of half a dozen pairs of booted feet against the plastic tiles of the tunnel's floor.

More airlock hatches, and then they were inside a laboratory building, striding along a corridor that was flanked by labs and offices. Through the computer center they walked, then more labs and a wide, dimly lit storage area where arcane pieces of equipment were neatly shelved.

Another section where white-smocked men and women bent over display screens and light tables, and then a final airlock.

They stepped out onto a wide metal catwalk. It ran in a circle all around a hollow area brilliantly lit by so many arc lamps that there were no shadows whatsoever.

The nucleus of the atom, Stoner thought. The DNA in the heart of the cell.

At the center of the brilliantly lit hollow was the alien starship, just as Stoner had remembered it. A smooth metal oblong with gently rounded edges, twenty-five meters long, six deep. Light tan, almost the color of the coveralls that Markov and Baker and An Linh wore.

"So that is a starship," said Markov, awe in his voice.

"Not awfully big," Baker said.

"But think of how far it's come," said An Linh.

An extension of the catwalk led to a platform alongside the spacecraft. Without asking, Stoner walked to it. The others followed. They crowded shoulder against shoulder on the metal platform and peered inside the ship. Its entire top half was dimly transparent.

"He's gone!" Stoner said.

The bier was empty. The body of the alien that had once rested upon it was missing. The artifacts that had surrounded the bier were also gone, and one whole bulkhead of the

compartment had been removed to reveal a mass of stacked crystals, like diamond necklaces hanging by one end, that glittered in the light of the arc lamps.

Two human technicians stood inside the spacecraft now, clad in white coveralls. One held a hand-sized display screen which she peered at intently, checking off items on a list with an electronic stylus. The other bore a heavy backpack of metal cylinders. He bent down on one knee and slid a transparent visor down over his eyes. Then he started cutting the floor plates of the spacecraft compartment with a laser torch.

"The alien's been taken away," Stoner repeated.

Jo nodded. "They removed him years ago, so they could examine the body."

"But . . ."

"The body has been cremated, Dr. Stoner," said a new voice. "Burned to an ash. At my order."

They all turned to see Everett Nillson, lean and pale as death, standing at the railing of the catwalk, grinning at them. Behind him stood a quartet of uniformed guards, each carrying snub-nosed submachine guns.