Joker Moon

by George R. R. Martin

  “I didn’t.” Among Sergei’s quirks was the desire to argue fine points of conversation.

  “Was she doing anything else? Did she just appear?”

  “She seemed to be … searching. Looking around.”

  “Why did you think she was a ghost?”

  “I could see through her.”

  “She was naked?”

  “No, in some kind of colorful wrap.”

  “A dress?” Grigori could not believe he was having this conversation.

  “A sari, that’s the word.”

  Grigori blinked. “A giant ghostly woman in a sari. Looking, watching…”

  “She was very close to our pipeline. I think she was tugging at something.”

  “Tampering with our pipeline?” Grigori’s heart rate jumped.

  The tented habitat at the mouth of the tiny lunar cave was still connected to the Luna lander, dependent on power generated by the lander’s solar panels, and still drawing water and some oxygen from tanks. If those failed, Grigori and his crewmates would die. Perhaps Sergei would linger a bit longer as he breathed carbon dioxide exhalations, but only for a few hours.

  “I think so.”

  “It’s worth investigating,” Grigori said, hoping that he sounded calm and controlled.

  He unzipped the passage to hab, and saw Viktor and Terenty finishing their meal. “New task this morning. You two go outside to check the pipeline.”

  Terenty didn’t look up from his food bag. “Searching for Sergei’s ghost?”

  “Checking for damage.”

  Viktor collapsed his food bag with unusual force. “He should do it.” He being Sergei.

  All four full-sized cosmonauts had made excursions—space-suited hikes on the lunar surface—in order to erect the tents and configure the equipment.

  But Sergei’s suit had developed several troubling issues, from overheating to air loss, during that first intensive week of work. “He would go if he had a suit,” Grigori said.

  Viktor, as he did so often these days, persisted. “It will cost us a day’s air.”

  “You’ve wasted more time and money chasing women, so do as you’re ordered. Go, survey, report back. An hour at most. And take pictures.”

  Two hours later, after more grumbling than useful work, Terenty and Viktor, in suits, exited the fabric air lock outside the hab tent.

  They were unusually quick with their prep, prompting Belka to complain, “They didn’t sit before they left.” There was a Russian tradition that before departing on a trip of any kind, one must sit quietly first.

  Grigori was surprised that he hadn’t noticed, but blamed the lapse on fatigue. “We’re engineers, not grandmothers,” he said.

  Grumbling, Belka went off to the cave to do maintenance on the processing gear. Sergei continued to look after the plants.

  Grigori monitored the surface sortie. As commander of the mission, Grigori had information that Terenty and Viktor did not. All Soviet cosmonauts were given preflight intelligence briefings. Earth orbital missions gathered visual and electronic data, so crewmembers had to be briefed on enemy targets in a special access room at the training center.

  So Grigori wasn’t totally surprised when, a month prior to the Luna launch, he was summoned to the Aquarium, the glass-walled headquarters of the Military Intelligence Service in downtown Moscow.

  He signed in and was directed to a bare, dark room with a single table and three chairs.

  There he sat. And sat.

  He waited just long enough to consider departing without the briefing, when finally a pair of agents, one in uniform, one in a baggy suit, entered. The uniformed agent, a major, was tall, pale, blond, and, strangely, wore rubber gloves. “I am Kostin,” he said. “This is Polyakov.”

  Polyakov was solid, bald, perhaps sixty. His civilian clothing suggested that he worked for State Security, not Military Intelligence—two organizations that hated each other more than they hated the Great Enemy U.S.A.

  “Cousin Polyakov?” Grigori said. His reward was a tight smile from the civilian.

  But rubber-gloved Kostin ignored him as he began to speak. “The Americans returned to the Ocean of Storms six years ago.” He meant the second flight of the strange little Quicksilver vehicle in 1981.

  “I saw the news in Pravda.” Indeed, Grigori had marveled at the flight of the plucky vehicle, even as he discounted it as a human accomplishment: A joker had made the flight possible.

  “Then you know that two of the crew returned—Sampson and Mitchell.”

  “And the third, the woman Eva-Lynne, died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there other information?” Briefings at the training center had covered the same subject, since the Quicksilver missions were the primary reason Luna would be landing in the Ocean of Storms. Oh, the site was level, with suspected caves close by. And visits by unmanned Soviet probes had mapped and surveyed the area more thoroughly than any other on the lunar surface. But the real reason was, if it was good enough for the Americans, it was good enough for the U.S.S.R.

  Kostin turned to Polyakov. Grigori sat up, since he knew that State Security had unique sources. The older man cleared his throat and spoke for the first time. His voice was smooth, cultured. “We’ve studied the lunar surface from orbit. Eleven years ago we spotted a strange structure on the surface of the far side.”

  “Something built by the Swarm?” Grigori had been recalled to fighter duty in order to fly missions against the alien invaders of 1985.

  “Always a possibility. But every analyst who saw the image said the structure resembled the Taj Mahal.”

  “A secret Indian space effort?” Grigori smiled at his own joke, and Polyakov chuckled. Kostin only examined his rubber fingers.

  “At this point, anything is possible. And later attempts to spot the structure failed, with one exception. Whatever built it might have destroyed it.”

  “Or hidden it.” Now Kostin spoke.

  “Or relocated it,” Polyakov said. “So be alert.”

  Kostin smirked. “Tell him about the second image, cousin.”

  Polyakov actually seemed uncomfortable, which Grigori found especially intriguing. “One of the images, inconclusive, seemed to show a human woman we call the Moon Maid, near this Taj Mahal.”

  “A human female, on the Moon?”

  “That was our conclusion.”

  And that was the end of the briefing. Grigori headed back to the training center confused and amused.

  He gave the Moon Maid no more thought. Until today.

  There were many challenges for the Luna mission, but what frustrated Grigori to despair were those caused by poor design and manufacture. Heading that list were the radios. The Moon-Earth communications system was a joke, constrained first of all by orbital mechanics and basic geography, meaning that the Luna crew could only speak with Control for a few hours every day.

  During their first two weeks the cosmonauts, notably Viktor, had faithfully transmitted surface images and videos of their work as well as “happy worker cosmonaut” messages, all for public consumption.

  But subsequent sessions were limited to operational matters and “psychological support” talks with family members, no doubt disappointing the propaganda ministry.

  Surface communications were even worse. The hab and support tents had decent radios, but those in individual sortie suits had short range and questionable direction. Worse, those radios used Luna itself as their relay and signal boost, so the suit links tended to work best when the cosmonauts (and the antennae on their backpacks) faced toward Luna. When they turned away, or were out of line of sight, the result was static.

  So, as Terenty and Viktor followed the line and vanished into the darkness, Grigori and Belka took turns peering out the tiny hab tent window and seeing nothing.

  And hearing less. Terenty was not a talker at the best of times, so his relative silence was no surprise. But Viktor was a chatterbox.

  Nevertheless, during the
first half hour of the excursion, even he limited his communications to odd grunts or brief statements about distance from the tents.

  “How are the science experiments?” Viktor’s primary accomplishment all during training and operations on the Moon had been the development and deployment of five experiments, essentially metal boxes with antennae that recorded elements of the lunar environment and transmitted data to Earth.

  The package was sited near the pipeline and connected to it, since it had its own small but powerful electrical generator. Viktor was unusually slow to respond, and unusually testy. “Fine as far as I know.”

  Grigori had to ask about damage to the pipeline, and only heard a “stand by,” which meant little.

  “They’re pouting,” Belka said. “They didn’t want to go out to search for a ghost.”

  “It wouldn’t be the most useless excursion we’ve made.”

  “They’re tired.”

  “We’re all tired.” Grigori reached for the microphone but as he touched it, he heard a blast of static.

  “… something…” was the only word he could make out among the crackle. That was Viktor’s voice. More static followed, then, “… not possible … she…” Grigori gave the receiver a whack, and heard, “… following her…”

  Then Terenty: “Vika!” A sudden, clear shout, followed by a, “No, no, no.” Then a curse and heavy breathing.

  Nothing from Viktor.

  More static.

  And then silence.

  Grigori had no choice but to make an excursion of his own. “You have two hours of air,” Sergei informed him.

  “That should be enough,” he said. He would either rescue Terenty and Viktor, or learn their fate.

  Space suits had been vital to the success—such as it was—of the mission. But their useful life span was simply unknown. Motors burned out. Fabric and seals hardened in the extreme temperatures. Suits could simply fail, popping like balloons.

  That might have happened to Viktor or Terenty, or both.

  He entered the air lock, a fabric blister on the exterior of the hab tent barely large enough to hold the three pressure suits, a pump, and an oxygen tank.

  Even with full confidence in the suits, Grigori and his team had been careful about making surface excursions. They were inherently dangerous, there was frequently nothing to be learned—and each exit ate up several dozen pounds of precious oxygen.

  And while Grigori had performed a dozen lunar excursions by now—a figure he would have thought impossible as recently as last year—he always felt nervous once the backpack was sealed in place. (You entered the suit through its open back, sliding feet and legs inside the legs and boots, then wriggling arms into place as you bent and somehow wrenched your head through the neck ring into the helmet. Then your partner would close the backpack and flip the necessary switches to enable the airflow. You had two hours of air, more or less.)

  Grigori had never been able to don a suit in less than half an hour, and that was with full-sized help. But, powered by adrenaline and aided by Belka, who crawled up, down, and around the suit like a monkey, he was wedged into his suit in fifteen minutes. Just before locking down his helmet and sealing himself inside, he called, “Sergei! Have they said anything?”

  “No words. Someone is making sounds.”

  Grigori looked at Belka. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That one of them is still alive. You’d better hurry.”

  Belka was reaching for the latches on the helmet, but Grigori stopped him. “When Control calls, tell them I want to speak to an official of State Security named Polyakov.”

  Belka got a quizzical look on his face. “Just do it,” Grigori said.

  Sergei, the crew expert on air and consumables, announced, “They are on fumes by now.”

  “Maybe they reached Luna,” Belka said.

  “Then they would be in touch through Luna,” Grigori said.

  Called back to active duty during the Swarm attack, Grigori had flown combat missions in which colleagues were killed. But they were fellow pilots, not his responsibility. Even though he had problems with Terenty and Viktor, and allowing for the danger of a lunar excursion—potentially more deadly than flying combat—he was not prepared to lose one, much less both.

  Especially given the way he had summarily ordered them outside to chase a phantom.

  Belka latched the helmet.

  Twenty minutes of Grigori’s two hours was lost waiting for air to bleed out of the air lock. The fabric structure would flap—noiselessly—then go limp, a sign that the air was gone and that it was okay to open the outer door.

  Which he did, stepping onto the dark gray lunar soil.

  His first goal was to follow Terenty and Viktor’s tracks while also searching for any sign of the Moon Maid. The arms of the lunar hillside that embraced the tent and cave site allowed for a widening cone of access—perhaps a hundred degrees right in front of the air lock, broadening to 180 and more after you walked a dozen meters.

  Grigori conducted a visual scan and saw nothing but the now-familiar cluster of boot prints he, Terenty, and Viktor had left over the weeks.

  Moving out, he immediately and automatically fell into a shuffling gait as he followed the power and fuel lines leading to the lander a thousand meters away and considered the possibility that he might have to complete the mission with only his two joker crewmates.

  Belka’s path to the lunar mission had originated within the Communist Party apparatus: the small joker had actually been a Party representative at the Bauman Technical School, then at the design bureau that developed Soviet space vehicles.

  When a joker department was created within the cosmonaut corps, due to his education, his undoubted skills with equipment repair, his size, and his family connections (his father was high up in the Ministry of General Machine-Building), Belka was an obvious choice.

  Sergei had been found in the Gulag within weeks of the Swarm invasion, when the Soviet military put aside its habitual hatred for jokers and, as it had done with proscribed political prisoners during the Great Patriotic War, decided to make use of them.

  Grigori could only imagine the harsh methods used to identify these individuals. Four of them, including Sergei, had joined the cosmonaut team in 1986.

  It had taken three times as long to prepare these souls—who saw an opportunity for death and glory in space as opposed to mere death in Siberia—to be useful as crewmembers.

  As the Luna mission grew more real, and the limitations on supplies and equipment more obvious, the utility of cosmo-jokers was inescapable. Grigori found his pair to be far more valuable than jet jockeys like Terenty, or even an aerospace engineer like Viktor—typical nat cosmonauts.

  After all, a joker who transformed carbon dioxide into oxygen was invaluable in a space crew.

  But why Grigori Florianovich Kolesnikov? Of the five, he was the most experienced cosmonaut, having earned selection at the young age of twenty-seven in 1974 after spending five years flying jets in various Central Asian locales. He had made one spaceflight in 1980, piloting a Sever spacecraft to a docking with the first of the Zarya series of space stations to serve a sixty-day tour with two other cosmonauts.

  The mission was intended to facilitate spying on the United States and Europe. But one day Grigori had been alerted to the approach of an American Hornet spaceplane. In itself this was not unusual—both sides spied on each other. But with the close encounter his orders were to activate the Nudelman cannon mounted on the underside of the Zarya.

  And when the teardrop-shaped Hornet hove into view, Grigori had uncaged the cannon and fired a shot in its general direction. It was only one, and it missed the Hornet by a substantial distance.

  But the shot forced the Hornet to divert and move off, and Soviet officials trumpeted Grigori’s automatic and ineffectual actions as a heroic attack on the forces of imperialism!

  Grigori knew better, but saw no reason not to go along with the Pravda. As a resul
t, he had volunteered for Luna—and won the assignment.

  Aside from his orbital “heroics,” what Grigori brought to the lunar trio was Soviet purity—he was a Russian Russian from the Smolensk region west of Moscow, specifically the town of Vyazma. His father, a millworker who had served honorably in the Great Patriotic War, had the ideal proletarian background. His mother was an elementary school teacher.

  There were no political unreliables in his immediate or even larger family.

  And no jokers.

  He had also conducted his personal life “in accordance with Party norms,” at least in public. He was married, though his relationship with Maya was frequently as frosty as that between the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A., and father to a budding “Young Pioneer,” eight-year-old Nadezhda.

  Also helpful was his fluency, at least by Soviet military standards, in English. That was due to his mother, Irina, who had some English herself, and knew that it would be helpful. Grigori had excelled in secondary school English, then finished first in his Air Force school language program, too.

  His relative fluency helped with his selection as a cosmonaut—and the assignment to the Zarya mission, since so much of the work involved listening in on American military transmissions. It might also have been the key factor in his selection to lead the Luna mission, with its need for global publicity.

  What Grigori preferred to believe he brought to the crew was the experience of spaceflight—the realization that the day-to-day work of any mission was a three-way split between maintaining the human organism (eating, exercising), maintaining the vehicle itself, and then performing the primary tasks.

  On Zarya, the task had been aiming cameras and radio collectors at a list of American targets. On Luna it was to carve out a preliminary habitat and prove that it was possible to convert lunar rock to water and oxygen.

  Of course, today, it was to save his crew.

  Grigori’s helmet was equipped with one light on each side, but the left one had failed in the first week, so since his visibility was limited to a few meters on his right, he trod carefully, keeping close to the fuel line near his left foot.