“My pleasure, sir.”
“I’ll see you in the office at oh-eight-thirty,” the admiral said, by way of good night.
“Yes, sir!” Tuttle knew the admiral’s tone meant: mission accomplished.
He felt exalted. He had won over the admiral to his plan and the admiral had taken on the White House and Congressman Nickerson. And won. The project was definitely go.
Scanning the dwindling crowd, excitement bubbling within him, Tuttle saw Willie Wilson. The Urban Evangelist was shaking hands, wishing people well as they filed past him on their way out. He pumped the admiral’s hand, and then Mrs. O’Kelly’s. She smiled girlishly at him.
“Thank you kindly, Admiral. The people of the inner city will appreciate your help and understanding.” Wilson turned to the next couple in the impromptu line, as an aide whispered behind him. “God bless you, Senator. Hope you win by a landslide next year…. Thanks for coming…. Good to see you….”
Tuttle hung on the fringes of the dwindling crowd, practically bursting to tell somebody his Good News. It was Top Secret, of course, but he couldn’t keep all this excitement bottled up inside himself. Some of it had to come out.
Finally Wilson noticed him. “Freddie, is that you in that fancy uniform?”
“Hello, Will,” said Tuttle.
The evangelist was in his trademark blue denim suit, with a white shirt and flowery bandana knotted at his throat. He was scarcely taller than Tuttle, and whippet thin. His face was bony, all angles. His hair was angelic golden blond; his eyes the cold gray of an Atlantic storm.
“I haven’t laid eyes on you since—when was it, Freddie? Atlanta?”
“New Orleans,” Tuttle corrected. “After the cops tried to break up your street meeting.”
“Yes, I remember now. Two years ago. The Catholics were getting nervous in the service about me.”
He’s had his teeth capped, Tuttle saw. I guess you have to when you do so much work on television.
“I saw you over in Georgetown,” Tuttle said. “You pulled a good crowd.”
“A high school gym,” Wilson replied. “That’s not much. Next time I come back to this town we’ll fill RFK Stadium.”
“I hope you do.”
“We’re getting bigger all the time.”
“I know. People are starting to notice. Especially the TV spots. You put on a good show.”
A small crowd was piling up at the doorway behind Tuttle, waiting to have their final word with the guest of honor. His aides fidgeted nervously and looked at their wristwatches.
“Well, we’re trying,” Wilson said. “It’s a long, hard road.”
“Yes, I guess it is.”
“So why’s the Navy at my party? Who was that admiral just went by?”
Tuttle laughed and heard himself say, “Maybe the Navy’s getting religion.”
Wilson grinned back at him.
“Something big is happening, Willie,” Tuttle whispered suddenly, uncontrollably. “Something so big that it’s going to blow everybody’s mind.”
“What do you mean, Freddie?”
Gesturing halfheartedly at the others milling around them, Tuttle whispered, “It’s too soon to say. But it’s big. Enormously big. As soon as we can verify that it’s really true, I’ll get word to you.”
Wilson put on his best smile. “That’s fine, Freddie. But what’s it all about?”
Shaking his head, Tuttle said, “You’ll know when I tell you. Nothing like it’s ever been seen before. All I can say is—watch the skies.”
“Lord, you make it sound like the Second Coming.”
“Maybe it is,” Tuttle answered, completely serious. “Maybe it is.”
Chapter 10
But even if we encounter life on the other planets of this Sun, it seems most unlikely that we shall meet intelligence. The odds are fantastically against it; since the solar system is at least five thousand million years old, it is altogether unreasonable to expect that other rational beings will be sharing it with us at this very moment.
To find our peers, or more likely our superiors, we must look to the stars. There are still some conservative scientists…who would deny that we can ever hope to span the interstellar gulf which light itself takes years to cross.
This is nonsense. In the foreseeable future…we shall be able to build robot explorers that can head to the stars, as our present ones are heading to Mars and Venus. They will take years upon their journeys, but sooner or later one will bring back news that we are not alone.
That news may also reach us, more swiftly and in richer detail, in the form of radio or other messages…. Even now, if it was felt worthwhile, we could build a transmitter that could send signals to the nearest stars.
Stoner pecked hesitantly at the computer keyboard. The typewriterlike terminal was perched shakily on the dining room table. The video screen readout unit sat next to it, flickering with pale green letters and symbols that danced across its screen. The dining room was littered with stacks of printout sheets and photographs. The entire side wall of the dining room was filled with bookshelves that Stoner had cobbled together out of boards and bricks, with the help of his security guards. Every shelf bulged with books.
He didn’t have the house to himself, though.
In addition to the brawny young Navy guards who patrolled the grounds and prowled periodically through the house, cluttering the kitchen and checking all the doors and windows, there was a growing stream of visitors from Washington and elsewhere taking up the big living room, next to the pool. Military men, most of them, with bundles of logistical plans in their briefcases. Stoner could hear them arguing, sometimes shouting at each other, through the thick sliding doors of the dining room. Arguments about food requirements and bedding, insurance tables and electronic spare parts.
Stoner tried to avoid them as much as he could. They were welcome to the living room as long as they didn’t interfere with his work. He shut their brassy voices out of his mind and concentrated on tracking the orbit of the spacecraft, using the Big Eye photographs and the computer to analyze its path.
It has to be a spacecraft, he kept telling himself. It can’t be a natural object.
McDermott came to the house regularly, and not even the heaviest oaken doors could muffle the old man’s deep, booming voice. Tuttle was there often, as well, but the little lieutenant commander was too deeply engrossed in planning their move to say anything to a mere astrophysicist.
Despite himself, Stoner could hear bits and pieces of their discussions. The project had acquired a code name: Project JOVE. And their arguing was mostly about where to place Project JOVE. McDermott kept bellowing about Arecibo. But more and more the other voices countered with another name: Kwajalein.
“What are you doing?” Jo asked.
She sat up in the bed, tucking the sheet modestly under her armpits. It was early morning, a quiet Sunday in mid-November. Crisp sunshine filtered through the bedroom curtains of the New Hampshire house.
Jo had arrived on Friday evening, as usual, with a heavy folder of photographs from Big Eye under her arm. They were stamped Confidential and addressed to Stoner. The photos were beamed by laser from the orbiting telescope to NASA’s Goddard Space Center in Maryland. From there they were transmitted by secure wirephoto cable to the Navy headquarters in Boston’s virtually deserted waterfront. Jo picked them up at the gray Navy building each Friday afternoon and drove them up to Stoner in New Hampshire. And stayed the weekend.