Voyagers II - The Alien Within Read Free

sooner than this.”
    “The alien spacecraft was recovered almost twelve years ago. You’ve been kept in cryonic suspension until the biotechnicians figured out how to thaw you without killing you.”
    “And the spacecraft?”
    Richards’s eyes shifted away slightly. “It’s in orbit around the Earth.”
    “The alien himself…”
    “He was quite dead. There wasn’t a thing anybody could do about that.”
    Stoner leaned back in the chair and glanced out at the sea again.
    “I’m the first man ever to be revived from cryonic suspension?” he asked.
    “That’s right. The scientists wanted to try some human guinea pigs, but the government wouldn’t allow it.”
    “And the doorway you came in through, you learned that trick from the spacecraft.”
    Richards nodded again. “That …trick— it’s revolutionizing everything.”
    “The ability to transform solid matter into pure energy and then back again,” Stoner said.
    “How would you…” Richards stopped himself. “Oh, sure. Of course. You’re a physicist yourself, aren’t you?”
    “Sort of. I was an astrophysicist.”
    “So you know about things like that,” the psychiatrist assured himself.
    Stoner said nothing. He searched his mind for the knowledge he had just given words to. The alien’s spacecraft had opened itself to him in the same way: a portion of the solid metal hull disappearing to form a hatchway. But he had never thought about the technique for doing it until the words had formed themselves in his mouth.
    “How much do you remember?” Richards asked. “Can you recall how you got to the alien spacecraft?”
    It was Stoner’s turn to nod. “The last thing I remember is turning off the heater in my suit. It was damned cold. I must have blacked out then.”
    “You remember Kwajalein and the project to contact the spacecraft? The people you worked with?”
    “Markov. Jo Camerata. McDermott and Tuttle and all the rest, sure. And Federenko, the cosmonaut.”
    Richards touched the corner of his mustache with the tip of a finger. “When you got to the alien’s spacecraft, you deliberately decided to remain there, instead of returning to Earth.” It was a statement of fact, not a question.
    “That’s right,” said Stoner.
    “Why?”
    Stoner smiled at him. “You want to know why I chose death over life, is that it?”
    “That’s it,” Richards admitted.
    “But I’m alive,” Stoner said softly. “I didn’t die.”
    “You had no way of knowing that….”
    “I had faith in the people I worked with. I knew they wouldn’t leave me up there. They’d bring me back and revive me.”
    Richards looked totally unconvinced. But he forced a smile across his face. “We’ll talk about that some more, later on.”
    “I’m sure we will.”
    “Is there anything I can do for you?” Richards asked. “Anything you want to know, anyone you want to see?”
    Stoner thought a moment. “My kids—they must be grown adults by now.”
    The psychiatrist glanced up toward the ceiling, like a man trying to remember facts he had learned by rote. “Your son, Douglas, is an executive with a restaurant chain in the Los Angeles area. He’s thirty-three, married, and has two children, both boys.”
    Thirty-three, Stoner thought. Christ, I’ve missed half his life.
    “Your daughter, Eleanor,” Richards went on, “will be thirty in a few weeks. She’s married to a Peace Enforcer named Thompson; they make their home in Christchurch, New Zealand. They have two children, also. A girl and a boy.”
    “I’m a grandfather.”
    “Four times over.” Richards smiled.
    A grandfather, but a lousy father, Stoner told himself.
    Richards’s smile faded. Slowly, he said, “Your ex-wife died several years ago. A highway accident.”
    The pain surprised Stoner. He had expected to feel nothing. The open wound that their divorce had ripped out of his soul had been numbed long ago, covered with emotional scar tissue as thick as a spacecraft’s heat