Chapter 43
The communications center on Kwajalein was in an uproar. Even the technicians at their consoles were yelling at one another in confusion.
Jeff Thompson, standing beside Ramsey McDermott’s chair, was hollering into the old man’s ear, “We can’t let them go on! The farther out they go toward the alien, the more impossible it’ll be to get them back!”
McDermott’s jowls sagged. He had lost ten pounds and aged a decade in the months since he’d first seen the aurora mocking him. His shirt collar gaped around his wizened neck. His hands shook uncertainly. His eyes had lost their fire.
Edouard Reynaud, his arm no longer in its sling, gripped Thompson’s arm. “You must call them back. You must make them come back!”
“Can’t…” McDermott croaked.
“But they can retrofire into a lunar orbit,” Reynaud insisted. “I have the numbers in my head. They should have enough fuel for that.”
Thompson brightened. “Right! If they can get themselves back into an orbit around the Moon we might be able to send something up there to ferry them back to Earth.”
But McDermott shook his head weakly. “Stoner won’t listen…”
“QUIET!” an amplified boice roared.
Everything stopped. People froze where they were. The room went silent, except for the electrical hum of the communications consoles and the buzz of the air conditioners.
Lieutenant Commander Tuttle was standing on a desktop, microphone in hand. He gazed around the room and, satisfied that all attention was on him, let the hand holding the mike drop to his side.
“This is a Navy project,” he said, voice sharp and loud enough to be heard across the stilled room. “And I am the Navy officer in charge.”
Thompson stared at the little lieutenant commander. For the first time since he’d met the man, Tuttle was making his uniform look good.
“The goal of this project is to make contact with that alien spacecraft. Stoner and the Russian are on their way to do just that. So you will all get back to your jobs and stop the yakking.”
“But they won’t be able to return to Earth!” Reynaud shouted, his chubby face going red with either anger or embarrassment, or perhaps both.
“That’s a problem that we’ll have to tackle,” Tuttle snapped. “Stoner is aware of it. He’s the only one of you who’s kept his head. If he’s willing to risk his life to make contact with the alien, the least we can do is see to it that whatever he discovers is received here and properly recorded so that the whole human race can study it. Now get to work!”
They moved. Numbly, sullenly, with grumbles and whispers they turned back to their jobs.
Reynaud, trembling in his perspiration-soaked white shirt, glared across the big room at Tuttle as the Navy officer climbed down from the desk. For the first time in many years, Reynaud knew real anger. He also knew that Tuttle was right.
“There it is!” Stoner shouted. “I can see it!”
Federenko took his eyes from the radar screen and leaned across to look through Stoner’s observation port.
“It glows,” he whispered.
They had come up on the alien craft with the Sun at their backs. The radar image had been fuzzy, almost nebulous, at the longer wavelengths. But when Stoner turned on the microwave radar the image cleared up and showed a smaller but much sharper blip.
Now he saw the spacecraft itself.
It glowed with a strange, eerie, golden light, like a shimmering aura that surrounded the solid craft. The spacecraft was imbedded in the glowing light. From this distance it was still too far away to make out details, but it appeared to be roughly oblong in shape, with a smooth surface and rounded corners.
“No wonder it looked like a comet to the ground radars,” Stoner realized.
“What is the light?” Federenko asked.
“A screen of some kind?” Stoner guessed. “A screen of energy like a magnetic field, maybe. To protect it against cosmic radiation. Maybe a shield against micrometeors, too.”
They were closing fast on it. Stoner floated out of his seat and wormed his way back to the orbital module of the Soyuz. Taking the stubby, compact telescope from its clips on the equipment rack, he focused on the alien ship through the nearest observation port.
“If it’s come all this way from another solar system it must have been in space for hundreds of thousands of years, at least,” he called, loudly enough for Federenko to hear him on the other side of the open hatch. “But its surface looks smooth and clean. No meteoric erosion. No pitting.”
“What is color?”
Squinting through the telescope, Stoner said, “Hard to say. The light around it makes everything look kind of golden.”
“Are cameras recording?”
Stoner glanced at the equipment monitor panel. The camera lights were on. So were the video transmitter lights. “Yes,” he called.
Stoner watched for what seemed like an hour as they glided closer to the spacecraft’s surface and Federenko spoke to ground control. The spacecraft’s surface was absolutely featureless, and as smooth as the skin of a supersonic aircraft. Not a rivet, not a seam, not even a line of decoration.
Then he realized that they were not getting any closer. Leaving the telescope hanging weightlessly, he ducked halfway through the connecting hatch.
“You can get us a lot closer, Nikolai. It won’t bite us.”
“No closer,” Federenko said firmly.
“Come on, we…”
“Orders from ground control. They are working on new course for us, get us back to Earth.”
“Terrific. But in the meantime we’re here!”
“Not to use maneuvering fuel,” Federenko said. “Take photographs, describe spacecraft for radio and tapes.”
“But we can rendezvous with the thing!” Stoner insisted. “For Chrissake, it’s only a stone’s throw away!”
“Too long a throw. You are Olympic champion, maybe?”
“Come on, Nikolai!”
“Must not use maneuvering fuel,” the cosmonaut replied stubbornly. “Orders. Our lives depend on this.”
Stoner pulled back into the ovoid orbital module and peered out the observation port at the alien craft. It was close enough now to make out clearly with the naked eye. It hovered against the stars, tantalizingly near, its golden energy screen glowing, pulsating slowly, like the deep eternal breath of God.
They seemed to be at rest now compared to the alien vehicle. They rode alongside, about a hundred meters off its flank, riding silently against the stars, close enough to touch, too far away to touch. Stoner knew that their placid, seemingly motionless encounter was an illusion. Both craft were hurtling away from Earth, flying farther from safety each second. The alien was heading out of the solar system, back into the the unthinkable gulf between the stars, and unless they broke away and took up a new trajectory, Stoner knew that he and Federenko would also leave Earth’s grip forever.
He stared hard at the alien spacecraft, knowing that a million miles away, men and women were working frantically to find a way to bring them back home safely.
“Fuck it,” Stoner muttered. He reached for his pressure suit, hanging limp and lifeless on the opposite wall of the orbital module.
“What you do, Shtoner?” Federenko called from the command module.
“I’m going out,” Stoner said, yanking on the pressure suit leggings. It was no simple matter in zero gravity. “I’ll use the backpack maneuvering jets to get to it.”
“Not enough fuel in backpack. Alien is too far away.”
“Nudge us a little closer, then. Close enough for me to reach it.”
“No.”