Voyagers II - The Alien Within Read Online Free PDF

The lighting in the room was dim, the people monitoring the screens looked like shadowy wraiths condemned to study the flickering green and orange glowing screens until they had atoned for the sins of their earlier lives.
    Stoner remembered a similar room, on Kwajalein, where he and others had tensely watched radar screens that showed the approach of the alien spacecraft. That room had been cramped, hot, sweaty with fear and anticipation. This room was cool, spacious, relaxed, and so quiet that Stoner could hear the hum of electricity that fed the display screens.
    No one bothered to turn around or look up as they came in. Richards went straight to the nearest unoccupied station and slid into the empty chair there. He touched the keyboard, and a convoluted set of ragged lines spread themselves across the screen.
    For several moments he studied the display, touching the keyboard to bring up new data, then staring intently at the screen. Finally he gave a heavy sigh, punched a single button, and the screen went dark.
    “What is it?” Stoner asked in a whisper as Richards got up from the chair. Whispering seemed the proper tone in this quiet, darkened chamber.
    “What…Oh, nothing,” the psychiatrist answered. “The EEG seems normal enough.”
    But even in the shadowy lighting Stoner could see that Richards was not telling the truth. His eyes avoided Stoner’s.
    “Nothing unusual?” he asked.
    “I’m not a psychotech,” Richards evaded. “Maybe somebody who’s more expert than I will be able to see something in the EEG that I missed.”
    A single word pronounced itself in Stoner’s mind, a word that seemed to flow from Richards’s mind to his own.
    Schizophrenia.

CHAPTER 6
    Jo leaned back in her softly yielding leather chair and studied the faces of the two men. Healy looked distressed, like a freckle-faced little boy who had been caught doing something naughty. But Richards looked really troubled, a man with a frightening weight on his shoulders.
    She had spent an hour in the office by herself, combing the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the computer and phones, the windows and draperies, searching for bugs that might have been planted by an ambitious young rival such as the public relations director, or a suspicious board member, or an agent for a competing company, or by her husband. She remembered enough of her MIT training to feel that she could clean her own nest, but it bothered her that she had found nothing. Nothing at all.
    Still, she had to have this showdown with Healy. It suddenly struck her that maybe her chief scientist was actually disloyal to her. Maybe he was the leak in her security.
    She reset the office’s colors to cool greens and blues, and selected just a hint of salt tang for the room scent. She lowered the air temperature several degrees: she was blazing hot enough. Then she waited, in a plain gray blouseless business suit adorned only by her corporate logo pin. The two of them arrived at her outer office exactly on time. Jo did not keep them waiting; she had her secretary usher them in immediately.
    “I learned yesterday that Stoner has not slept since he’s been revived,” she said once the two men had taken chairs facing her.
    Richards flicked a glance at Healy, who looked thoroughly miserable.
    “I learned that information from the chairman of the board,” Jo went on. “Why didn’t I learn it from you?”
    Healy replied, “We haven’t put it into any of our reports yet….”
    “I know that,” she snapped.
    “We’re still not sure of the significance of it,” he said, squirming in his chair.
    “A man doesn’t sleep for five straight nights and you’re not sure that it’s significant?” Jo kept her voice low and icy calm.
    “We…we’re studying it,” Healy said weakly.
    “And how did the chairman of the board find out about it?”
    Healy spread his hands. “I don’t know! Somebody in the lab must have talked….”
    “Did you know that there was a