He was sitting at the little maple writing desk the Navy guards had found for him, bent over a sheet of paper.
“I’m writing a letter,” he replied, “to an old friend of mine. One of my former teachers. He’s an astrophysicist: Claude Appert. Lives in Paris.”
“He’s French?” Jo asked.
“As French as the Eiffel Tower.” Stoner finished addressing the envelope and turned in his chair to face Jo. “I want you to mail this for me when you get back to Cambridge.”
Her brows arched upward.
“They won’t let me mail anything out of here,” Stoner explained. “Especially overseas.”
“What’s in the letter?” she asked.
He folded two flimsy sheets of paper and tucked them into the envelope. “I’m asking him if anybody in the European astronomical community has picked up unusual radio signals from Jupiter.”
“That’s a security violation, isn’t it?” Jo pointed out.
With a shake of his head, Stoner said, “I didn’t say we had found anything. I just asked if he’s heard anything.”
Jo said, “The Navy wouldn’t…”
“Listen to me,” he snapped. “They’re using us, Jo. Do you understand? Using us. We’ve stumbled across an incredible discovery, and all they can think of is to keep it secret and try to turn it to their own military advantage.”
“But…”
“But nothing! We spend our lives squeezing out every drop of knowledge about the universe that we can, and they treat us like civil servants. They take our knowledge and turn it into weapons. They throw us in the gutter whenever they feel like it, whenever they decide to cut down on the money they spend for research. Cattle are treated better! The government spends more money subsidizing the goddamned tobacco industry—causing cancer—than it spends on cancer research.”
“What’s that got to do with the radio signals?” Jo asked softly.
Stoner was on his feet now, lecturing, forgetting that he was naked. “When we come up with some hint of power, with some new idea that might help them control people or kill them, then they put us into harnesses and won’t let us work on anything else.”
“We don’t live in a peaceful world, Keith.”
“I know that. But what’s Tuttle’s first reaction to the possibility that we’ve found intelligent life? Not awe. Not even curiosity. Not even fear! They want to lay their hands on any new technology the aliens might have—so that they can improve their weaponry.”
Jo said nothing.
“That’s why they want to keep this news away from men like Sagan and Phil Morrison. Those men have international reputations. They can get the United Nations or some other international organization to make a united, worldwide program out of this. The military doesn’t want that! They won’t allow it! That’s why they’ve got me bottled up here like a prisoner. That’s why they want to move the whole damned operation off to some military base. They want to keep the whole damned thing a secret.”
“I know that.”
“Well, I’m going to blow the lid off this thing,” Stoner said, waving the envelope in one hand. “That’s what this letter is all about.”
“Keith, you’re only going to get yourself in real trouble.”
“We’re in real trouble now,” he countered, “and as long as they can keep this thing secret, the whole world is in trouble.”
“I don’t know if I should mail this for you, Keith,” Jo said.
He walked over to the bed, sat on its edge beside her. “Mail it. They can’t put me into any deeper trouble than I am now. And it’s important that the whole scientific community learns about what’s going on here.”
Reluctantly, Jo took the letter from his hand. She looked at the address, then turned and placed the envelope on the bed table beside her purse.
Stoner didn’t tell her that the second sheet in the envelope was addressed to one of the authors whose book he had read a few nights earlier. A Russian linguist who had written an interesting monograph about possible extraterrestrial languages: Professor Kirill Markov, of Moscow.
More weeks went by, and Stoner patiently worked by himself while the wrangling went on in the next room.
McDermott promised us a warm winter, Stoner grinned to himself. It’ll be April Fools’ Day before we get out of New England.
Thompson brought the Englishman to the house on a bitterly cold morning, one of those New England days when the sun shines brilliantly out of an absolutely blue sky, but the air is a frigid mass of biting dry polar stuff that slides in from Canada and sends thermometers down to zero for days on end.
From inside the house it looked beautifuclass="underline" bright sunshine glittering on pristine snow, trees stretching bare limbs into the crystal sky. Stoner spent all of two minutes admiring it when he first arose.
He was quickly down in the dining room, chugging away at the computer keyboard, exasperated because there just weren’t enough early observations of the spacecraft to get a true fix on its origin. A blast of cold air told him that someone had just come in through the door in the rear of the kitchen.
Stoner didn’t bother looking up. The computer terminal was starting to rattle off the answers to his latest equations, typing automatically, chattering across the paper at an inhumanly mad speed, numbers and symbols springing across the sheets faster than his eyes could follow.
Jeff Thompson called, “Hi, Keith. Busy?”
Stoner turned in the dining room chair, an acid reply on his tongue, but saw that Thompson had an older man with him.
“Keith, this is Professor Roger Cavendish.”
Stoner saw a man of about sixty, tall but very spare, thinning white hair, bony skull of a face, deepset eyes, bushy eyebrows. He stood there in his overcoat and scarf, gloves in one hand, and gave Stoner a quizzical half-smile.
“Professor Cavendish?” Stoner asked. “From Jodrell Bank?”
“Yes,” Cavendish said softly. “Quite. Don’t tell me my reputation has preceded me?”
“Your work on organic molecules in interstellar clouds isn’t exactly obscure,” Stoner said, getting up from his chair and extending his hand to the Englishman.
Cavendish’s hand was cold, his grip lukewarm.
“And you’re Stoner, the astronaut, eh?”
“Former astronaut.”
“Yes. Quite.”
Thompson took the coats and yelled in from the kitchen that he would put on a kettle for tea.
“There’s instant coffee, if you prefer,” Stoner suggested.
Cavendish actually shuddered.
Stoner walked into the living room. Cavendish’s impressive brows went up when he saw the pool.
“My god, what splendor. Is it heated?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, how stupid of me. Otherwise it’d be a skating rink in this weather, wouldn’t it?”
Stoner grinned. “Well, there’s a lot of hot air pumped into this room. The military and logistics types have their meetings in here.”
“Ah. I see. Naturally, they’d take the best facilities for themselves.”
Gesturing him to an armchair, Stoner asked, “What brings you to this place?”
Cavendish sat down and stretched pipestem legs. He was the perfect picture of an English academic: baggy tweed suit, sweater beneath his jacket, drooping little bow tie.
“NATO, actually,” he replied. “Your intelligence people have been asking some interesting questions about radio signals, so our intelligence people put two and two together and finally NATO got into the act. One thing led to another, and here I am.”
“You’re representing NATO?”
“Quite.”
“And you’ll go with us when we move to Arecibo, or Kwajalein, or wherever they put us?”