Voyagers II - The Alien Within by Ben Bova Read Free Book Online

nuclear power plants and neatly planted vineyards, she thought that she could at last face her adopted father as an adult, an equal, no longer afraid of the unspoken emotions that surged between them.
    Her father was dead. He had been killed that very afternoon in an auto accident, senselessly, as he drove to meet her at the bus station. An Linh’s mother collapsed. She had to take charge of the funeral arrangements herself, while her mother was taken to the same hospital where her father had worked.
    There they found the cancer that was eating away at her body. And there they began the years of desperate therapies to save her life. Chemicals, radiation, lasers, heat, ice, diet—the doctors tried them all. To An Linh it seemed as though the woman she had known as a mother had been transformed into a haggard, passive, weak, and helpless experimental animal, melting away, visibly shrinking with each passing day. But deep within the woman’s body, too deeply enmeshed with her vital organs for surgery or even X-ray laser beams to reach, cancerous tumors were growing. The body that could not conceive a baby created its own grotesque parody of life, cancer cells that multiplied endlessly. Like soldiers facing hopeless odds, the doctors slaughtered the enemy cells ruthlessly. But each tumor they killed gave rise to other tumors.
    Her mother was dying. The chief internist of the hospital put it as gently as he could, but in the end he told An Linh that there was nothing more they could do except try to make the final days as painless as possible.
    “But all the new medicines that have been discovered,” she said, feeling a wild anger taking control of her. “The genetic techniques that have been developed…”
    “Useless,” said the physician. “We have tried everything.”
    Fighting down the fury that was making her heart pound so hard she could feel it in her chest, An Linh said, “Then freeze her.”
    The man’s silver brows rose several millimeters.
    “I want her frozen, like that astronaut was, years ago.”
    The chief internist’s office was spacious and impeccably neat. He was not a man who tolerated slovenliness, not even sloppy thinking.
    “But my dear child,” he said softly, “that would be pointless. And quite expensive.”
    “I want her frozen as soon as she is pronounced clinically dead.” An Linh had studied the possibilities for a school assignment. “I will sign the necessary releases.”
    “No one has ever been successfully revived after cryonic immersion. Neuromuscular function…the cytoplasm…” The physician was falling back on jargon in an unconscious effort to intimidate this willful, utterly beautiful but determined young lady.
    “As long as she remains frozen there is always the hope that one day she can be revived and cured.”
    The internist shook his head sadly. “The cost…”
    “I will pay,” An Linh said flatly.
    And she did. Her university days were finished. She applied the small legacy her adopted father had left to her mother’s maintenance, then headed for Paris and took a job as a television news researcher. Within a year she had reached the bed of the company’s chief executive and wangled an assignment to Indochina. She gained brief worldwide fame for her poignant, passionate story of her homecoming to that troubled part of the world and how it was finally taking the first timid, tentative steps toward peace and human kindness.
    The Indochina story got her an offer from a Canadian news agency. An Linh accepted, partly because the pay was very good, partly because it got her away from the executive in Paris, mainly because it brought her closer to the United States, where the frozen astronaut was hidden away by the corporation that had rescued his body and returned it to Earth. After a year in Quebec, though, she longed for a warmer climate. And she had heard persistent rumors that the frozen astronaut was in a laboratory somewhere in the Hawaiian Islands.
    She was