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CHAPTER 1
THE sudden heat was like a sodden, muffling blanket that weighed so heavily he could hardly breathe.
Jõao de Sagres gasped and felt sweat streaming from every pore of his body as they struggled through dense jungle foliage. Fronds slapped at his face. Birds cawed and shrilled overhead. The ground was spongy, squelching underfoot. His expensive silk suit was drenched in seconds, stained and ruined. He dared not even to glance at his muddy shoes. Yet the man Stoner seemed perfectly at ease in this dripping, raucous, sweltering tropical forest. Hardly a gleam of perspiration showed in his intense, dark-bearded face.
"Where are we?" de Sagres asked in a whisper.
"Almost there," said Stoner.
"How did ..."
Stoner silenced him with an upraised hand. On a branch high above, a long-tailed monkey stared solemnly at them, then disappeared among the leaves in a blur of motion.
"Get down," Stoner hissed.
Dazedly, de Sagres did as commanded and dropped to his knees in the bushes. The grass was alive with insects. De Sagres saw ants the size of his thumbs crawling busily across the leaves a few centimeters in front of his face. He shuddered and began to itch all over.
"I don't understand ..."
"Shh!"
He wanted to get up and run away, but to where? What was he doing in this strange dank oven of a jungle? How did this man Stoner bring him here? We should be in my office, speaking politely to each other over a civilized drink, with the air conditioning and ice cubes at hand, with my aides and servants and security guards protecting me.
Yet he was kneeling in the mud of a tropical forest, bedraggled and sticky with sweat, certain that poisonous insects were devouring his flesh, trembling with fear. And totally unable to get away. It was as if he were chained to Stoner, shackled to the man like a prisoner.
Stoner was peering intently through the dense foliage. De Sagres studied the big man carefully. A fierce, uncompromising face, like an Old Testament patriarch. Patrician nose, strong cheekbones, a full dark beard that now showed drops of sweat in it, dark hair trimmed neatly. Powerful body, tall and lean and flat- bellied as an athlete's beneath the simple khaki jacket and whipcord slacks that he wore.
It was Stoner's eyes that unsettled de Sagres. They were gray, as gray as a distant thundercloud or the tossing stormy sea. Yet his eyes did not look troubled at all. Rather, they were as serene as any saint's, and terribly, terribly deep; there were depths in them that seemed infinite. When de Sagres had first looked at Stoner he had been startled by those strangely fathomless eyes; it was like the first time he had peered into a telescope and seen the universe of stars beyond counting.
For all his broad-shouldered build and fierce appearance, it was Stoner's compelling gray eyes that held de Sagres in an unbreakable grip of steel. The eyes of a madman. Or a mystic. They had fastened onto de Sagres's soul and they would not release him. De Sagres had received no hint, when he had welcomed Stoner to his private office in the capitol, that he would end up in this rotting infested jungle. Stoner had led and he had followed, as helpless as a lamb.
The forest went suddenly silent.
Stoner turned toward him. "Look. They're coming."
Despite himself, de Sagres hunched closer to Stoner and leaned on his strong back as he stared out through the concealing foliage at a sun-dappled clearing in the thick tropical forest. Massive rough-barked trees rose all around the clearing, their boles soaring like the pillars of a cathedral, their canopies a solid green carpet as far as the eyes could see. But this clearing, about the size of a football field, was open to the hazy, searing sunlight.
A line of grotesque dark-skinned men was forming on the farther side of the clearing. Naked except for scraps of dirty cloth covering their groins, each man was elaborately painted in garish designs that covered face and body. Each man carried a long, sharp-tipped spear.
Another line of forty-some men appeared on the opposite side of the clearing. Also naked and painted and armed with spears.
"Where are we?" de Sagres pleaded.
Stoner shook his head. "Does it matter? Watch."
The two lines of warriors confronted each other, separated by the width of the clearing. They waved their spears and stamped their feet, chanting and yelling back and forth.
"Notice the ground between them," whispered Stoner.
"It is worn down to bare dirt," de Sagres saw.
Grimly Stoner nodded. "This isn't the first time warriors have faced each other at this spot."
"They're going to fight?"
"They are from two different villages. One of the men from one village has kidnapped a woman from the other village. Her kinfolk have raised this army to recapture her. And to steal as many of the other village's women as they can. The kidnapper's village has brought their own army here to defend themselves. If they kill enough of their enemy they can raid the enemy village itself and steal pigs as well as more women."
"How do you know all this?"
Stoner merely shook his head slightly and whispered, "Wait ... I think — yes. The elders have arrived."
Half a dozen wizened old men, bent and grizzled with age, stepped into the sunlight between the two armies. Their naked bodies were unpainted; they bore no weapons. They walked slowly, with great dignity, to the middle of the clearing and stood for many minutes, speaking earnestly among themselves.
"What are they doing?"
"Trying to prevent the war," said Stoner.
One of the white-haired men raised his hands above his head and spoke in a loud quavering voice to the line of warriors at one side of the field. Then he turned and spoke to the other side. The warriors shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, glanced at one another.
Another of the old men spoke to each side. Then a third.
Finally the two groups of warriors turned and disappeared into the jungle as silently as snakes. The old men waited several minutes more, then they broke into two smaller groups and went their separate ways, each group following the path of the warriors.
The birds began to call and whistle once more.
Stoner's bearded face broke into a broad smile. "They did it! They talked the warriors out of fighting. They prevented the war."
De Sagres realized his legs were cramping painfully, he had been kneeling for such a long time. He let himself fall back on his buttocks —
— and found himself sitting in his own office chair, behind his imposing, immaculately gleaming desk.
CHAPTER 2
"HYPNOTISM!" snapped Jõao de Sagres.
Stoner made a wintry smile. "Something like that."
De Sagres glared at his visitor as he peeled off his sopping, stained silk suit jacket and pulled his once-immaculate tie loose from his shirt collar. His hands still trembled, even though he was safely back in his spacious office. Through the long windows he could see the reassuring gleaming towers of Brasilia.
I am the president of the most powerful nation of Latin America, he told himself. And this man before me is a nobody. But he avoided Stoner's eyes.
He felt better, although his mind was still in turmoil. He was a smallish man, with a high forehead and round face that would have been bland except for the luxuriant black mustache and his probing dark brown eyes. This office was his sanctuary, where he could sit on his elevated platform and look down on the supplicants and schemers who came to beg favors from him.
"You tricked me," he accused.
"Not really," Stoner replied. "I showed you something very important."
"A band of savages in the Mato Grosso," de Sagres sneered.
Stoner, sitting in the leather armchair in front of the president's imposing desk, replied, "They are men. And they are in New Guinea, not the Mato Grosso."
"New Guinea! Impossible! One moment we are here in my office, and then suddenly ten thousand kilometers away? And then back here again? It was a trick! Admit it!"
"I wanted to show you that even so-called primitive men have ways of preventing war. Those elders, they are called 'the Great Souls' by their people. They talked the warriors out of fighting."
De Sagres reached toward the intercom.
But Stoner suggested mildly, "Don't you think you could make your own drink?"
He pulled his hand back as if scalded. For a moment he simply sat in his high-backed swivel chair, looking troubled, undecided, almost frightened. Then he rose and walked shakily across the thick carpeting to the mirrored cabinet that served as a bar.
"If you have some Jamaican dry ginger ale," said Stoner, "I'll have it with brandy. On ice."
By the time de Sagres mixed the drinks and returned to his desk he had pulled himself together somewhat. His hands barely trembled; the ice in the glasses clinked hardly at all.
"You somehow talked your way into my private office, past all my staff and security. Why? Merely to show me a conjuring trick?"
Stoner sipped at his brandy and dry. "Not entirely."
"Then what it is that you want?"
"I want you to become one of those 'Great Souls.'"
De Sagres's dark eyes flashed. Then he threw his head back and laughed. "You want me to live naked in the jungle with those savages? No thank you!" But Stoner was deadly serious. "I want you to
prevent your military from intervening in the civil war in Venezuela."
The president's mouth dropped open.
"Your general staff thinks they are clever enough to move their troops across the border without having the Peace Enforcers intervene. Perhaps they are right. I can't predict how the Peace Enforcers will react. The political situation is murky, after all."
"We have no intention ..."
"Don't lie to me. Your army has been supplying the Venezuelan insurgents for more than a year. It was your army's agents who fomented the civil war in the first place."
"That's not true!"
Stoner said nothing. He merely stared at de Sagres.
The president felt like a little boy under the awesome presence of a sternly uncompromising priest. "We merely ... the Venezuelan insurrection was a genuine movement, we did not create it."
"You armed those farmers. Trained them. Led them to believe they could accomplish more with guns than they could with negotiations."
"The government of Venezuela has ignored their farmers for generations!"
"And to rectify that injustice you are helping those farmers to slaughter one another."
De Sagres ran out of arguments. He felt strangely empty, hollow. He tried to turn away from Stoner's infinite gray eyes and found that he could not.
"You must exert your authority over your own military," Stoner said. His voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet there was implacable iron in it.
"You don't understand how difficult that would be."
Stoner smiled slightly. "Yes I do. Would I be here otherwise? Would I have taken you to that jungle if a simple request would have been sufficient?"
"The military ..." "The military will take over your government unless you stop them now. Their plans include not merely annexing Venezuela. They want their chief of staff to sit in your chair."
De Sagres's heart constricted with fear. He realized that he had known it all along, but had never found the courage to admit it, even to himself.
"What can I do?" he whimpered.
"Stop them now," said Stoner. "The people of Brazil will support you. The Peace Enforcers and World Court will support you."
"But the army is too powerful."
"Only if you are too weak." Stoner leaned forward in his chair, stretching a hand over the desk to grasp de Sagres's wrist. It was like being held in an inhumanly powerful vise.
"You can become a 'Great Soul,'" Stoner said urgently. "You can save your people untold grief and pain. And the people of Venezuela, too. If you don't, the military will take over your government and you will be lost and forgotten."
De Sagres wanted to run away and hide. But Stoner had him pinned down like a helpless insect. His arm began to tingle.
"You have the power to do it," Stoner insisted. "Do you have the strength?"
The president wanted to admit that he did not, but he heard himself saying, "I can try."
Stoner's smile beamed at him. "Good! That's all that anyone can do."
"If I fail ..."
"You won't be any worse off than you are now. The army won't kill you; they'll keep you as a figurehead for their puppet government."
"A figurehead? Me? Never!"
Stoner considered the Brazilian president for a long, silent, solemn moment. De Sagres felt as if his soul was being stripped bare and examined, atom by atom.
"Will you do me a favor?" Stoner asked at last.
De Sagres arched his brows. It always comes down to a favor, he told himself.
But Stoner extracted a small straight pin from the breast pocket of his khaki jacket and pricked the tip of his thumb. A drop of blood welled up.
"This is as primitive as those 'Great Souls,'" he said, "but I'd like to make a blood bond with you, to seal the understanding between us."
Unwilling, but unable to resist, de Sagres held out his trembling hand and allowed Stoner to grasp it in his own warm, firm grip. The touch of the pin was painless, and then they were pressing their thumbs together like little boys sharing a solemn, sacred oath.
"You have the strength to stop your military adventurers," Stoner said. "You have greatness in you. One day you may even win the Nobel Prize for Peace."
The president of Brazil sank back in his chair as his unannounced visitor strode purposefully to the door and disappeared from his sight.
CHAPTER 3
THE island of Cyprus, once torn by bloody conflict between Greeks and Turks, basked in the Mediterranean sunshine and the money spent by ten thousand members of the International Peacekeeping Force who made the island their Middle East headquarters. Clerks, computer specialists, missile technicians, sensor analysts, bureaucrats, warriors by remote control, each of the ten thousand men and women who wore the sky-blue uniform of the Peace Enforcers was paid well and regularly.
They had brought peace to strife-weary Cyprus, as Greeks, Turks, and even the descendants of displaced Palestinians found more to be gained by earning Peace Enforcers' money than by shooting at one another. Prosperity did not end hatred and long historical grudges; it merely put them to one side while everyone put their best energies into the scramble for steady money.
Banda Singh Bahadur, commandant, IPF Cyprus, was a huge Sikh, still strong and fierce-looking despite his eighty-odd years. His proud curly beard was as white as the immaculate turban wound around his leonine head. His back was unbent, his shoulders wide and square as a castle gate. In bygone eras he would have wielded a heavy curved sword against his foes, or fired a high-powered rifle with merciless, deadly accuracy.
Now he sat in a padded leather chair, surrounded by younger officers in a comfortable air-conditioned office as they pored over satellite pictures of poppy fields in Turkey. The picture table was one large horizontal display screen, and the false-color imagery he studied was being relayed in real time from an IPF surveillance satellite several hundred miles above the Earth's surface. Four young men and one woman officer were hunched around the table, bending over, scrutinizing the imagery.
The entire span of the table top glowed with harsh colors that showed steep jagged ravines deep in the Taurus Mountains, near Lake Van. The face of an old man, thought Bahadur as he studied the seamed craggy display. Much like my own.
"Papaver somniferum," said Bahadur's imagery analyst, a blonde young woman from California. "I'd recognize that signature anywhere."
Bahadur looked up at her with eyes of cold steel. The young officer touched a few buttons on the keypad built into her side of the display table. A spectral analysis of the region they were examining appeared in a box at one corner of the horizontal screen. Alongside it appeared a laboratory spectrum that matched it so closely Bahadur could not tell the difference.
"It's poppy fields, all right," said the intelligence chief, a stocky oriental. "And illegal as sin."
Bahadur nodded a ponderous agreement, yet still brought up the display that showed all the legal poppy fields in the region. They were small and under the relentless control of the Turkish government. The fields in the satellite views twined through tortuous valleys far from the eyes of government inspectors.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Voyagers III Star Brothers"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Ben Bova.
Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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