“Damned if I know. I’ll have to work all night on this to figure out what’s wrong,” Thompson said.
“I must’ve made a mistake somewhere.” A gloomy note of self-criticism crept into her voice.
“You’ve been under a lot of pressure.”
“That’s no excuse.”
Thompson pushed his chair away from the desk slightly and straightened up from his usual hunched-over position. “Mac’s really leaning on you, huh?”
Jo smiled sadly. “More than you know.”
He could feel his blood pressure rising. She looked so helpless, so vulnerable.
“It’s a shame Keith dragged you into his crackpot scheme. It wasn’t very smart, writing to the Russians.”
“He didn’t tell them anything he wasn’t supposed to say!” she flared.
“That’s not what the Navy thinks.”
“He’s a good man,” she insisted. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody.”
Thompson grinned at her. “Neither would Chamberlain.”
“Who?”
“Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who caved in to Hitler at Munich.”
“Oh,” she said. “History.”
Suddenly Thompson felt very old.
They pored over the computer runs for another hour, but Thompson found he couldn’t concentrate on it. He wanted to work on Jo, instead. Finally, with an enormous effort of will, he pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up.
“Look, kid, you’d better go home. It’s going to take the rest of the night for me to figure out where the glitch is.”
She looked concerned. “I’m willing to stay here and help you…”
“No,” he snapped, a bit desperately. “Go on home. Get some sleep. I’m going to phone my wife and tell her to tuck the kids in and keep supper warm for me. I’ve got three kids, you know.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Okay. Off you go. See you tomorrow.”
She got up from her chair, almost reluctantly, Thompson thought, and went to the door of his cubbyhole office. “I’ll check the data recorders downstairs before I go,” she said.
“Fine. Good night, Jo.”
He stared for a long while at the doorway after she left. Then he phoned home, but the line was busy. Nancy and her goddamned girl friends.
He turned his full attention to the computer printouts, trying to get the vision of Jo out of his mind.
But he heard her call, “Dr. Thompson!”
Looking up from the desk, he saw that she was back at the doorway, her face a mixture of worry and surprise.
“What’s wrong?”
“The signals,” Jo said, breathless with agitation. “They’ve stopped!”
“What?”
He bolted from his chair, barked his shin on the corner of the desk and hurried downstairs with her.
The big room was strangely quiet. No one else was there; the night shift wouldn’t come on for another hour. The big electronics consoles hummed softly to themselves. The tracing pens were strangely still, inking out dead-straight lines on the graph paper that unrolled slowly beneath them.
Thompson dashed around the cluster of desks in the middle of the room, found a headset and plugged it into the proper console.
He clapped one earphone to the side of his head.
Nothing.
Only the background hiss of the universe, laughing at him. The radio pulses were gone.
Chapter 16
This evening I witnessed one of the great political blunders of all time. The President revealed to the Premier of Soviet Russia, over the Hot Line, that we are working on making contact with the alien spacecraft we discovered in the vicinity of Jupiter.
The Premier pretended not to be surprised: said his own scientists are working on the very same thing. The President suggested a joint program, sharing people, information, facilities. The Premier gave a jolly laugh and said he’d like that very much.
He sure as goddamned hell would! And in the meanwhile, any shred of support the President had in Congress is going to bolt the Party when they find out he’s giving away our top scientific secrets to the Reds. In the name of peace and brotherhood!
It looks now as if I’ll have no choice but to try to wrest the Party’s nomination away from him. I’ve got to take these primaries seriously; it’s the only hope for the Party in November.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Cardinal Otto von Friederich began the long climb up the marble steps that led to the papal apartment. To the messengers and monsignors proceeding through the halls of the Vatican on the eternal business of Holy Mother Church, the cardinal seemed an austere, aloof symbol of majesty: silent and stately, slowed perhaps by age and arthritis, but the very picture of a Prince of the Church, with his pure white hair, ascetic angular features and swirling red robes.
Cardinal von Friederich knew better. His power within the Vatican was illusory. This new Pope had no time for an old man wedded to the traditions and training of the past. His audiences with the Holy Father were strictly formal nowadays; his days of influence and true power were over.
Silently he prayed the rosary as he climbed the cold marble stairs. The pain grew worse each day. It was a penance, of course, and he knew that God would not send him a Cross that he could not bear. Still, the pain raised a fine sheen of perspiration across his brow.
An elderly monsignor, chalky-white as dust, met the cardinal at the top of the stairs and silently ushered him into a spare, chilly little room.
Cardinal Benedetto was already there, of course, his red cape wrapped around his stocky body. Benedetto always reminded Von Friederich of a Turkish railway porter: squat and swarthy, almost totally bald even though he was nearly twenty years Von Friederich’s junior. But he was the Pope’s strong right arm these days, the papal Secretary of State, confidant and adviser of His Holiness. While Von Friederich’s position as head of the Propaganda Fide, had become little more than a sinecure for a dying old man.
How different it had been in the old days, Von Friederich thought. All my life I have served Italian Popes and battled the Italians dominating the Curia. Now we have a Polish Pope, and the Italians have overwhelmed me at last.
“My Lord Cardinal,” Benedetto said in Italian.
Von Friederich inclined his head in the slightest of bows. Even that tiny movement caused him pain.
The room was almost bare of furnishings. A small wooden desk, a few plain chairs. The only light came from the lamp on the desk. Out beyond the windows, the Vatican garden was already draped in the shadows of dusk.
In the gloomy darkness, Von Friederich could see that the walls were covered with frescoes by Titian. Or perhaps Raphael. He never could tell them apart. Vatican wallpaper, he said to himself, keeping his distance from Cardinal Benedetto.
Part of the painting on the wall he was facing—a congregation of saints piously praising God—suddenly swung away, revealing a door cunningly set into the wall. The Pope strode into the room, strong, sturdy, smiling at them both.
The room seemed to brighten. The Holy Father was wearing white robes, of course. But despite himself, Von Friederich had to admit that it was His Holiness’ beaming, energetic features that charged the room with light. It was the open, rugged face of a worker, a common man elevated to greatness, the kind of face that might have been St. Peter’s. A fisherman, not an aristocrat. But he rules the aristocrats and the workers alike, Von Friederich knew.
The cardinals knelt and kissed the papal ring. The Pope smiled and motioned for them to seat themselves.