He stared hard at the distant blue-white crescent of Earth as his words sped to her and her answer came back.
“But you’ll kill yourself!”
“I’ll have more than an hour’s time before Federenko gets too far away to pick up my suit radio and relay it to you. I can describe everything in this chamber in detail.”
He waited, counting the seconds, preparing what he would say next.
“And then you’ll die!” Jo said. “You’ll die up there!”
“That’s not such a terrible thing. My life hasn’t meant very much to anyone.”
It was better this way. He had time to think, time to get ready for her voice, to freeze his emotions and guard against hers.
“Your life is important, you damned idiot! You can’t throw it away!”
“I’m content to die out here, Jo,” he said. “It’s not such a bad way to go.”
He noticed that frost was forming on the edges of his visor again, despite the suit heater’s highest setting. The cold was seeping into him; he could taste its metallic bitterness.
“No, Keith, no!” There were tears in her voice. “Come back! Come back to me! You have so much to live for…”
“No, I don’t, Jo. This is the climax of my life. This is what it’s all been leading up to. What would I do for an encore?”
“You can’t throw away your life like this! We have our whole lives ahead of us!”
“You have your life, Jo. You’re young, the whole world lies ahead of you.”
The time stretched, and then, “But you said that the world can never be the same now that we’ve contacted the alien.” Her voice was fever-pitched. “We’re not the same! I’m not and you’re not. It’s a new world, Keith. We need you here. I need you here, to be with me.”
“Three minutes, Shtoner.”
Before he could answer either one of them, a new voice spoke in his earphones:
“Switch to frequency three. Priority message from Kwajalein.”
Almost glad to get away from Jo’s voice, Stoner clicked on frequency three as if cutting an umbilical cord.
“Go ahead Kwaj,” he said flatly.
“Dr. Stoner!” The voice was breathless, familiar. “This is Dr. Reynaud, from Kwajalein.”
For a moment Stoner felt almost giddy. He wanted to laugh. Reynaud, our chubby monk. Is he going to try to save my soul?
“Listen to me, please!” Reynaud shouted in his earphones. “I’ve examined the plot the computer has made of the alien spacecraft’s course. It will not be irretrievably lost once you leave it. Do you understand me? It will not be irretrievably lost!”
“You mean we’ll be able to track it on radar?” Stoner asked. “What good is that?”
“That is very important! Vital!” Reynaud’s voice was shrill with excitement. “We can go out and reach it again. We can recapture it and bring it back into an orbit near the Earth!”
Stoner shook his head inside his helmet. “It would take years to build the hardware to retrieve this craft. We just barely got this far and it took six months of planning. And we screwed it up anyway.”
“But we have years!” Reynaud insisted. “The alien will slow down as it moves outward, away from the Sun. We have perhaps five years before it reaches the orbit of Pluto…”
“Five years,” Stoner echoed.
“We can recapture the alien,” Reynaud repeated. “There’s no need for you to stay there.”
Federenko’s heavy voice interrupted. “Two minutes, Shtoner. I must start automatic sequencer now.”
“Yeah…”
“Bring back camera,” Federenko commanded. “Must return photographs to Earth. They are too valuable to throw away.”
“We can recapture the alien ship,” Reynaud said again.
Jo’s voice broke in on the same frequency. “Come back to me, Keith. Please come back.”
And Markov’s. “Keith, dear friend. Don’t be so stubborn. Dead heroes are of no value to anyone. From what Reynaud is saying, you can fly back to our visitor within a few years.”
Shuddering from the growing cold, Stoner realized he still held the stereo camera in his hands.
“The photographs, Shtoner. Now.”
He reached out and touched the spacecraft’s bulkhead, pushing himself toward the hatch. Where the hell is it? he asked himself. The entire hull was so transparent…
He felt it, a circular rim, open to space. Clipping the camera to his belt, he started to pull himself up and out of the alien ship.
Markov was still talking, “We can build new rockets and train new crews. And you will be the natural leader of such a program. You must come back and lead us. We all need you.”
“Please, Keith,” Jo’s voice pleaded.
He was halfway through the hatch when he looked back at the alien, resting silently for countless ages. And his mind filled with the bickering voices and flint-eyed faces of all the bureaucrats he had ever known. And McDermott. And Tuttle. He saw Dooley in his mind’s eyes, the agents and policemen and politicians who didn’t understand, who feared, who resisted, who would not accept reality even when it was thrust at them.
And he saw Cavendish, twisted and destroyed by them. And Schmidt, smashed into a pulp with his own hands.
“Shtoner, retrofire is in one minute. All is automatic. I cannot stay.”
“It’s all right, Nikolai,” he said quietly, sliding back inside the spacecraft’s transparent hull. His boots touched the springy floor at the alien’s feet.
“You get back to Earth, Nikolai. I’m staying here.”
“Keith!” Jo’s strangled scream.
“Don’t commit suicide,” Markov pleaded.
“It isn’t suicide,” Stoner said to them all. “You think I’m killing myself, but I’m not. I’m giving you an incentive, a double reason to come out as quickly as you can and recapture this treasure house. Because I’ll be here—frozen. Maybe I’ll be dead. But just maybe…maybe, I’ll be preserved, suspended, waiting to be brought back to life.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s a vacuum in here. No air. Temperature’s pretty close to absolute zero. It’s preserved the alien for god knows how many millennia. It ought to preserve me for a couple of years.”
He took a breath, realized their reply couldn’t reach him for many seconds, and went on, “It’s cold enough to flash-freeze me once I turn my suit heater off. I’ll ride with the alien for a few years. If you really care about me you’ll come out and get me before the two of us leave the solar system altogether.”
“Keith, you can’t…” Jo’s voice broke into sobs.
“I won’t be dead,” he told her gently. “I’ll be waiting for you, frozen, suspended between life and death, waiting for you to reach me and bring me back to life. Like the tale of Sleeping Beauty, only with our roles reversed.”
Markov’s voice was filled with grief. “She can’t speak, Keith. She wants to, but she can’t.”
“Kirill…Jo, listen to me. Make them work together. Create a global space effort, make the politicians do what needs to be done. Get the whole human race involved in this. We have the chance to reach the stars, all of us, to come out of the cocoon that we’ve been living in. Make them understand, make them look to the stars.”
The delay seemed to get longer with each exchange.
“How can we?” Markov’s voice pleaded. “We’re only ordinary people. We need you, Keith. You must return to lead us!”
“No, Kirill,” he said firmly. “You’ll have to lead them. It’s all up to you now. You and Jo.”
He waited for a reply.
“Ten seconds to retrofire,” Federenko’s glum voice tolled. “I can’t do it,” Markov answered at last. “You must come back. You must!”