The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

  Buchannon stared at Woody. There were tears in the Woodsman’s eyes. He gripped the trigger and -

  “PUT THE GUN DOWN!”

  Melanie was at the door with half a dozen armed men. How did she get there? Woody looked at Buchannon and there was pure hatred there, boiling over. Woody fired and Buchannon felt the blow to his chest like a sledgehammer. He stayed on his feet, feeling a tight pain and rolls of sickness. He saw - but didn’t hear - Woody fire again, this time at Melanie.

  But it was Woody that flopped like his legs had been filleted, dropping in a heap at his feet.

  Melanie ran to Buchannon and stopped him falling. She had been hit in the arm and there was blood between her fingers but she helped Buchannon sit down before he fell.

  “I’m sorry for playing a dirty trick on you,” she said, “but I didn’t think he’d shoot you.”

  Buchannon grunted. “Is he dead?”

  “Stunned.”

  “Why?”

  “We can treat him, given time.” She waved across a medic, who started treating Buchannon’s wound.

  “How did you find us?”

  “The injection I gave you contained a tracer. There was no virus present. I’d never kill you.”

  “So why say it and why creep into my bedroom with that weirdo?”

  “You had to hate me enough to find Woody for yourself.”

  “You made me find him despite myself.”

  “Because of yourself and your damn fool sense of responsibility that makes me love you so much.”

  Buchannon was lifted onto a stretcher and rushed outside. It was bright. When he closed his eyes he felt a kiss, and a hand in his own. “I did see a gun,” she said.

  Did it matter if he believed her?

  “Forget it,” he said.

  Time moves on, like a tumbleweed in the wind.

  Red Sky

  Command 655-268

  What do I most remember about the day of the moon landing? I remember my mother’s hand was soft and warm. I know that sounds weird, but it’s the truth.

  Oh, you want to know what else?

  I remember January 11th, 1969 was very, very cold. My breath formed a cloud as we walked towards the observation platform hand in hand. There were hundreds of strangers in heavy winter furs shambling around, stamping their feet on the impacted snow. I was similarly dressed in a heavy fur. The coat was too large and too heavy, but it fought the freezing air. Whenever my mother release my hand, I would slide them back into the long sleeves. On photographs I look like an anorexic bear. Sniffling with cold, when I was sure no one was looking, I would wipe my red raw nose on the sleeve.

  Men with thin lips and bright teeth greeted us. They all patted my head like I was a little dog. There. There. I kept my smile faithfully, for my father had gone to much trouble to arrange the trip. I was nervous about meeting the people, but excited at coming to see the launch.

  A man strode out of the crowd towards us. “Comrade Ruskin, I’m delighted to meet you ... and your little boy.”

  My mother thanked him, then she tugged my arm and we moved on, only pausing for the cameras.

  “We’re we going?” I asked.

  “To the front, so we can see.” She looked drained by the long train journey when she lit a cigarette. She was worried that it would all go wrong. We entered the VIP section. There were fifty seats, half still empty. Our names were in the middle of the front row. We sat. More people joined our row, including a fat man with a purple face, who sat down besides my mother. “Delighted to meet you. My name’s Deyenkov.”

  “My husband says you’re a genius.”

  Deyenkov laughed. “Only on Fridays. I take the rest of the week off.”

  I suppose he was being funny but my mother didn’t laugh. I could tell that she was tense. Deyenkov looked me straight in the eye. There was no warmth in his eyes. “Is this Andrei?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  “You look just like your mother.” Deyenkov looked at his watch, too briefly to read the time. “Excuse me, but I must go to the control centre. I hope you both enjoy the launch.”

  “Comrade Deyenkov, the pleasure is mine.”

  Deyenkov walked away.

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “No,” she said, sucking on the cigarette. “He’s KGB.”

  “Oh,” I said, not understanding.

  “He’s here to check up on the guests, to make sure we are not carrying bombs or copies of the New York Times.” She smiled, grimly.

  “Why would anyone want to carry a bomb?”

  “There are all kinds of mad people in the world, Andrei. Many don’t want us to succeed. Many are in the Soviet Union.”

  I was silent, thinking. “Is this to do with that Zond thing?”

  “Hush, that’s a secret. Your father should not have mentioned it.” She finished the cigarette and squashed it in the ash tray provided. “Never talk about Zond in public, you could get your father and me in a lot of trouble.”

  “Sorry.”

  She smiled then and kissed me. “Forget it. Let’s watch the rocket.” She lifted me up and stood me on the chair, handing me some binoculars.

  Suddenly Deyenkov returned. He tapped my mother on the shoulder. “I’d like you to meet Comrade Korolev. Andrei will be all right here with me, won’t you?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, warily.

  Deyenkov took my mother’s place. She walked along the row and towards a group of scientists in white coats. My mother greeted a man in a heavy grey overcoat, presumably Korolev, and then was gone.

  Don’t say Zond, I thought. The word Zond repeated in my head and I was sure Deyenkov could read my thoughts with his cold eyes. I shivered and stared through the binoculars. I could see the massive rocket in detail and the letters CCCP on the nose cone and even the cosmonauts on the boarding platform, waiting for the word to go. One of them was my father, Captain Ivan Ruskin.

  “Wave at him,” Deyenkov said, “he might be able to see you.”

  I waved but the cosmonauts did not see me. “Too far,” he said.

  I knew the other three cosmonauts: Valentina Tereshkova, Boris Yegorov and Vladimir Komarov. They had been at our home a number of times, drinking vodka and talking of space. I knew everything there was to know about the cosmonauts, from how Vladimir Komarov had almostly died in Soyuz 1 to Yegorov’s favourite coffee - which was the same as my mother’s.

  The N1 rocket was the biggest thing I had ever seen. Yes, I had seen pictures of the R-7, but this was a battleship turned to face the stars. I had imagined myself as mission captain, strapped into position at the controls, waiting for the countdown to end and the whoosh of the boosters, going up and up into space. Andrei Ruskin, cosmonaut, first man on the moon. My father.

  I watched the cosmonauts enter the Lunar Soyuz - LOK - and the platform retract. Father was inside. There was no turning back. There were a thousand different things that could go wrong and kill him. I remember thinking, he might not come back. That was the first moment I was scared for him. Until then the mission had seemed a long way away in the future.

  Vehicles moved away from the launch site, and the voice of the mission control grew louder.

  “... one minute to ignition ...”

  I wanted to be with Mother when it launched. I looked around the platform, but the crowd had grown. I could see nothing except black hats and furs ...

  “Andrei?” It was a woman. She had a pleasant oval face, bright blue eyes and mousy brown hair. Her cheeks were reddened by the cold. “Are you Andrei?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, unsure. Who was she?

  “I work with your father.”

  A lot of people worked with my father, I thought.

  She sat in Mother’s seat and said something to Deyenkov I did not hear. He shrugged, messed up my hair and disappeared.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m Leni, your father’s assistant. He’s told me all about you. Maybe he mentioned ... Are you
enjoying the trip?”

  “Yes, but ... but where’s my mother gone?”

  “She’s got business, Andrei.”

  “Oh,” I said. Business.

  “Look! They are about to launch!”

  I turned and faced the launch site. A siren wailed for the area to be cleared of personnel. Cameras got into position. There was a colour television housed over the platform relaying pictures. I had never seen a colour television before.

  I wished Mother was with me. I wanted her warm hand, needed her warm hand. I wondered why Leni had been allowed to watch when Mother had not. That wasn’t fair. What could be so important she would miss the launch?

  There was flash on ignition and then flames gushed from the boosters. Deep thunder rippled across the ground and I felt the power in my bones. Slowly, ever so slowly, the rocket lifted, clouds of smoke obscuring the rocket until it was over head and moving like a dart upwards, faster and faster.

  “I want to be up there,” I said, “wouldn’t it be fun? Can’t I go next?”

  Leni laughed. I couldn’t see what she found funny. I was serious. “You’re a bit young, Andrei.”

  Young! I ignored her comment. She knew nothing. My father was going to the moon and next time he would take me with him.

  “Will this beat the Americans?”

  “Yes - we have to beat the Americans.”

  The Americans. My father referred to the Americans always with a strange tone. The Americans ... were to be feared. Leni had the same tone.

  I peered through the binoculars, followed the vapour trail left by the rocket. “How long will it take?”

  “Eight days ... and that’s there and back. It’s just in time, too. There’s a rumour that the Americans are to speed up the Apollo programme, but - of course - providing nothing goes wrong this week it will be too late, won’t it?”

  I nodded, keeping both eyes on the sky.

  I was so proud of my father.

  I remember much of that day, but don’t remember shaking hands with the General Secretary Khruzchev, something people always ask me about.

  It didn’t seem important at the time.

  *

  Three days after the launch Mother and I were taken to the control room, to see the live pictures of the landing. The pictures appeared on a large TV, the images grainy and soundless. I watched, minutes before the rest of the televised world, the broadcasts from Lunniy Korabi as it descended with its three person crew from lunar orbit towards the grey disc. Father’s voice faded in and out over the speakers. He was setting the telemetry.

  The picture quality was poor and broke up for a worrying few seconds ... returning just before the grey surface completely filled the camera’s view.

  The soft landing had been smooth, but dusty as the four solid fuel engines fired on touchdown and kicked dust sideways.

  Major Komarov had been first on the ladder and an external camera showed the whole MAI-LK. The LK was green, the colour of USSR thermal paint. It was striking against the background of black sky and white lunar plains. Looking at the pictures I wondered why I couldn’t see stars. The ladder unfolded and thirty seconds passed before Komarov’s orange EVA suit appeared. He waved and then proceeded carefully down the ladder. Komarov reached the final rung and waited for the order from Earth to proceed.

  I remember Vladimir Komarov’s first words as he stepped onto the grey lunar surface. I - like millions of Earthers - would never forget.

  “The first great journey is over. The next has just begun.”

  Next Father descended, letting out a cry of pleasure which caused laughter in the control room. Mother hugged me. She was crying. So was I.

  *

  I remember the Red Guard parade through Moscow, thousands and thousands of soldiers walking the way to the Kremlin with a huge crowd all the way and the military transport taking the MAI-LK escape pod with the cosmonauts ... and I and my mother sitting in a large car, wondering when Father could come out of quarantine ... and the cameramen and journalists, asking if we were proud to be Russians on such a momentous day ... and the helicopter that brought Father home, he was with Deyenkov and Leni ... and the tour of schools and Universities, Father answering questions from want-to-be cosmonauts ... and the tour of America, he was on TV answering the same questions a million times ... and an old lady from New York, who hated communists and tried to kill him but succeeded in wounding a television anchorman ... all these times are joined in my memory.

  We lived far away from Moscow, in a house near the sea. I can’t remember the name of the place but it was hot in summer and mild in winter and our house was surrounded by trees and the nearest neighbour lived five miles away. There we would sit out at night and watch the stars and mother would cook steaks over hot coals and discuss politics. My mother was an Russian Orthodox Jew and she would tell stories of her family and the revolution. They were dissidents. She was only in the country because she had married Father.

  Apollo 11 landed on the moon on the 21st July. Neil Armstrong was the first American to step on the surface. The news was greeted with sombre acceptance. The US planned a moonbase within ten years. The newsreader said this was a direct attack on the USSR.

  “Why do we hate the Americans?” I asked.

  My father laughed. “We? Where did you get that idea?”

  “From the news.”

  “Don’t listen to that Krushchev propaganda. They are just like us.” Father lit a cigar. “I don’t hate them, but I do fear them. Their President Nixon is desperate for regaining his popularity after we beat them to the moon ... some people want the Cold War.”

  I did not understand. To a child the world seemed simple. If they were like us why did we fear them?

  Nixon was impeached over the Watergate scandal and the US changed the direction of their space initiative, setting up small manned stations, but they were years behind the Soyuz programme.

  Father retired as a cosmonaut on his thirty-fifth birthday because they would not let him take another space flight. They offered him a job in administration ... which he rejected.

  “I’ve still got ten years in me,” he said, drinking cognac from the bottle, “and they retire me because it would look bad if I got killed.”

  That summer he stayed in his study, drinking. I went to a school sixty miles away and came home at the weekends to a house cold and empty, despite my parents who were ghosts of their former selves. They had changed. Father would talk to nobody and Mother spent time alone, walking the beach and crying. She did a lot of crying.

  I started having a dream. In it Father went to the moon. There were aliens waiting for him, little green creatures with big black slits for eyes, hiding in craters. The aliens had attacked the cosmonauts, draining their humanity and replacing it with alien thoughts.

  Sometimes Father would sit out looking at the stars, not moving, just looking. I would ask him what he was looking at.

  “We’re so small,” he said, “and nobody knows it.”

  I occupied time with school work, reading the works of Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Hoyle - learning English and German so that I could read science papers in the original texts. I was an eleven year old kid who could not talk to eleven year olds. Children treated me with distrust.

  I was assigned a private tutor, a little woman with elephant skin, grey and wrinkled. She had blue eyes that bugged out from a thyroid problem. Miss Kadunsk. She talked a language I could understand, mathematics.

  I was dying inside but I didn’t know it, not then.

  One day Father told me about the first time he saw Earth from the moon. The world was the size of a coin and disappeared behind his thumb. “When you can do that, you realise how fragile we really are.”

  He was talking about himself, without the hope of going back to the moon he was lost. He was trapped on a planet where he no longer belonged. He would drink a lot and lose his temper. I was glad to have my studies, something to think about.

  When Leni came to see
Father, she had become head of aeronautics at Space City. She had heard how Father was wasting away, turning into a zombie. She begged him to take the administration job because he would be able to supervise the Soyuz and MIR programmes. He accepted. That was 1976.

  *

  We moved to Moscow and lived on the sixth floor of an apartment building. It was hell. A bleak Stalinist concrete and brick entity thrown up in the fifties. I could just see the Kremlin from the one window of the apartment. There were no trees. I missed trees. But the apartment was convenient for Father’s work. He stopped drinking at the news that Mother was pregnant and promised that everything would be all right.

  Baby Valery was born in November of 1977. Father and I went to the hospital, where there was a large crowd waiting. Yuri Gagarin shook Father’s hand. The picture appeared on the cover of Life magazine.

  Inside, the maternity ward was full, full of journalists. Mother was propped up in bed, holding the baby wrapped in blankets, letting photographers snap. Nurses pushed them out, leaving us alone. I kissed my mother’s cheek. Father lifted the baby. She was tiny in his hands. Valery was blue eyed and bright pink. “There are still wonders on earth,” he said.

  Nine days later little Valery died from a undiagnosed heart condition.

  *

  Her sudden death was a black hole nothing escaped. The apartment became claustrophobic, a prison. It was clear Mother blamed Father for the death and he in turn felt guilty. He spent more time at Space City, working late into the night, often staying out all night. Mother stayed at home, sleeping most of each day. She would get up in the afternoon, eat a cursory meal and sit before the gas heater, reading Franz Kafka. She was painfully thin and walked like an old woman. When doctors had told her that she could not have another child the walls closed in.

  Deyenkov phoned Father one day and the next I was enrolled at Moscow University studying aeronautics & astrophysics. There was no choice on my part - I was fifteen and it was a privilege to be at the University with the older students, but I was a fish out of water.