Voyagers II - The Alien Within Read Free Page A

shield. Or so Stoner had thought. Yet the news of Doris’s death cut right through and stabbed deep into his flesh.
    “Are you all right?” Richards asked.
    Stoner turned away from his inquisitive face and looked through the window, out at the sun-sparkling sea.
    “It’s a lot to take in, all at once,” he replied to the psychiatrist.
    “Yes,” Richards said. “We’ll take it as slow as you like.”
    Stoner turned back toward him. The man was trying to keep his emotions to himself, but Stoner could see past his eyes, past the slightly quizzical smile that was supposed to be reassuring. I’m a laboratory specimen to him; an intriguing patient, the subject of a paper he’ll deliver at an international conference of psychiatrists.
    He looked deeper and realized that there was more to it. Richards truly wanted to help Stoner. The desire to be helpful was real, even if it was underlain by the desire to further his own career. And even deeper than that, buried so deeply that Richards himself barely knew of its existence, was the drive to learn, to know, to understand. Stoner smiled at the psychiatrist. He recognized that drive, that urgent passion. He himself had been a slave to it in his earlier life.
    Richards misinterpreted his smile. “You feel better?”
    “Yes,” Stoner said. “I feel better.”
    The psychiatrist got to his feet. “I think that’s enough information for you to digest for the time being.”
    “How long will I be here?”
    Richards shrugged. “They’ll want to run tests….”
    Stoner pulled himself up from his chair. He towered over the psychiatrist. “How long?”
    “I really don’t know.”
    “Days? Weeks? Months?”
    Richards put on his brightest smile. “I truly can’t say. Weeks, at least. Probably a couple of months.” He started for the spot on the wall where the portal had opened.
    Stoner asked, “Can I at least get out of this room and walk around the place?”
    “Oh, sure,” Richards said over his shoulder. “In a day or so.”
    “They’re going to guard me pretty closely, aren’t they?”
    The wall glowed and the portal in it opened. “You’re a very important person,” Richards said. “The first man to be revived after cryonic suspension. You’ll be famous.”
    Glancing around the bare room, Stoner asked, “Can you get me something to read? I’ve got eighteen years of news to catch up on.”
    The psychiatrist hesitated a moment. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see that you get some reading material. But probably you ought to go slowly—there’s a certain amount of cultural shock that you’re going to have to deal with.”
    “Cultural shock?”
    “The world’s changed a lot in the past eighteen years.”
    “That’s what I want to find out about.”
    “In due time. For the first few days, I think we ought to confine your reading to entertainment, rather than current events.”
    A sudden question popped into Stoner’s mind. “Markov,” he blurted. “Kirill Markov, the Russian linguist I worked with. How is he?”
    Richards made a small shrug. “As far as I know, he’s fine. Living in Moscow again. I believe he sent a message asking about you recently.”
    He stepped through and the wall became solid again. Stoner stood in the middle of the room, thinking that the first use of the alien’s technology had been to make a jail cell for him.

CHAPTER 4
    Jo Camerata did not sit at the head of the conference table. Vanguard Industries had long ago dispensed with such archaic hierarchical formalities. The president of the corporation sat at the middle of the table, flanked on either side by members of the board of directors, most of them male. A dozen muttered conversations buzzed around the table as Jo took her seat. Directly across from her sat the chairman of the board, Everett Nillson, her husband.
    Nillson was a tall, rawboned Swede whose thinning blond hair and bushy eyebrows had been bleached nearly white by the Hawaiian sun. His eyes were such a