by Chris Jones
His own yearning to be there made it harder for Budarin to remain patient. He picked up the radio again. “We’re on the ground, we’re safe, but we don’t know where we are,” he said. “Does anybody hear us?” After listening to a wash of static, he turned to Bowersox and asked if he could see anything new.
“No, just the grass,” Bowersox said, turning his face toward the window. “But it’s so beautiful.”
In orbit, colors had been muted by filters—by distance, by space, by the atmosphere, by clouds, by dust, by having spent so long away that red and yellow and green had been reduced to memories. Now here was color again, and that grass was so bright, so green against the deep brown of the earth, that Bowersox couldn’t help staring at it. He saw home in those leaves. Each time he looked at them, he felt more and more human, the robot come to life.
Pettit, though, was having a harder time adjusting. He felt hot and heavy and tired and sick. “Sox,” he said in English, “I’m not going to be much good outside.”
“No problem, buddy,” Bowersox said, still staring at the grass and sounding enraptured. “We’ll just get you in the palatka”—the tent that cosmonauts are traditionally carried to after they’re lifted from Soyuz, to protect them from the rain and the wind that they haven’t felt for so long—“change your clothes, and let you go to sleep on the airplane.” It all sounded very pleasant.
Pettit wasn’t convinced. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose the package,” he said.
With that revelation, Bowersox suddenly felt less sunny. Gravity was set to bite him in the ass a second time. Still stuck at the bottom of a three-man pile, he stared down the prospect of Pettit showering him with the dregs of his last space-station chow.
“That’s okay,” Bowersox said, although the way he said it made it clear that it was not entirely okay. “Just do it in the bag.”
Pettit was silent for a beat, as though trying to resist the urge to puke. Instead, he was trying to figure out what Bowersox meant. When Pettit had said that he was going to lose the package, he wasn’t trying to find a gentle way to say that he was about to barf. He was literally losing hold of the books and manuals that had been pressed to his lap, now squeezed between his slippery hands. “No,” he said, “I’m talking about the—”
“Oh!” Bowersox said, laughing with relief. “That’s okay. Give ’em to me. It’s my turn to hold ’em for a while.” Pettit passed the bundles down, and Bowersox tucked the books between his head and the capsule’s inside wall. “They make a great pillow,” Bowersox said.
With perhaps the worst crisis of the entire mission averted—the cabin, for now, remaining vomit free—Budarin turned his attention once again to raising the search planes, still to no avail. “How long have we been waiting?” he asked.
“About twenty minutes,” Bowersox answered. “Do we have a beacon, a light we can shine?”
Budarin shrugged, lost in thought.
“Are we going to open the hatch?” Pettit asked.
Budarin didn’t answer, but after taking a long look at the Russian, Bowersox did: “No, not yet, Don. But Nikolai’s thinking about it.”
The sun was back in his voice.
· · ·
Bill Readdy had seen the tension ratcheted up high enough. In his cool, quiet way (he had a knack for making his usual monotone sound even more monotone when needed) he took it upon himself to try to calm down his friends and colleagues. He knew that because of Columbia, everybody was already on edge, already chewed down to the nubs. But that was then, and this was now. Calling the American delegation to his attention, he explained that it was perfectly normal for the radio transmissions to cut out. It happened all the time. Perhaps the capsule was on the other side of a hill, or perhaps its antenna had broken off. And had Expedition Six entered something called ballistic descent—he didn’t get into it, but it was his gut feeling that they probably had—they were no doubt fine, but they were sitting on a patch of grass a long way from their target. It would take longer than anyone might have liked for the good word to come through, but that good word would come, not to worry.
His speech bought a few minutes of much-needed downtime. There was quiet. But soon enough, phones began ringing again, and people began pacing and shouting again, and for most of the men and women in those two rooms, it started to feel as though the walls were closing in.
· · ·
After more than forty minutes locked away, restless and stiff, Bowersox tried one last time to get Budarin to change his mind. “I think we should get out,” he said.
“Yes,” Budarin said. “I think we should get out.”
At last, he reached across and cracked open the hatch. Sunlight and fresh air streamed into the capsule. The light was so bright that it almost hurt, but the air was clean and beautiful. They drank it up like spring water. In space, they had taken in a higher concentration of carbon dioxide than they were used to, and for Bowersox, it had left him feeling a little less like himself—as though he had a toothache or hadn’t had enough sleep. Now, swallowing down great big gulps, he was reminded of how he felt when he was in his spacesuit, outside station, filling his lungs with pure oxygen. He had felt alive then, just as he felt alive now, happy and content. He drew in a calm that he hadn’t known for a long time but had learned not to miss.
One by one, they unbuckled their seat belts, dragged themselves toward the hatch, shimmied through, and fell to the ground. There were no wolves. There were only white birds against a blue sky and Kazakhstan’s steppes, stretching out for nearly three hundred empty miles between them and their target. In that gorgeous moment, it could have been just a few feet or even a few million miles. Either way, it didn’t matter to them. There was a good possibility that in the long history of the planet, no one had ever been where they were. But for Expedition Six, this baleful place felt as familiar as breath. The sky, the grass, and the birds, they were universal. They were the constants that they had missed, the reminders that each of us see every day but rarely stop to take in, the signposts and flags and whispers that tell us that no matter where we are, on some level we are home.
“It’s really, really beautiful,” Bowersox said.
Budarin and Pettit nodded. Other than those nods, the three men stayed perfectly still for more than an hour, flat on their backs, feeling the sun on their faces, watching the birds. They were like kids staring at clouds. It was hard for them to know it then, but when they would come to look back on that time, they would remember it as one of the most perfect hours of their lives.
But with no call on the radio and with no shadows on the ground, they decided that they needed to start thinking about trying to rescue themselves. Bowersox and Budarin took a stab at standing, but the effort only made them feel sick. Instead, Bowersox pulled his spacesuit halfway off and crawled back into the capsule to retrieve supplies, first pulling a fleece sweater from the survival gear behind his seat. He also passed Budarin the shotgun, some flares, and a beacon that he’d found. It was set up, and then Bowersox began calling out through the radio, straining to hear an echo in the static.
“Knock knock. Anybody home?” Bowersox said. “We’re still waiting. Please, guys, find us.”
He called out again and again until, two hours after Soyuz TMA-1 had landed, one of the search plane pilots came through. “Can you hear us?” he said.
“We hear you,” Bowersox said, slumping a little with relief. “We hear you okay. Do you hear us?”
“We hear you well,” the pilot said. “How do you feel?”
“We’re tired,” Bowersox said, the adrenaline hangover having started coming on strong. “I feel like going to sleep. But it wasn’t a bad trip for the first time.”
Just about then, Bowersox realized he had been talking to himself. They had lost the connection.
After a long while, the radio crackled back to life. “How do you feel?” the pilot asked again, having missed the answer the first time around. “Sorry,” he was quick to add, not w
aiting for Bowersox’s reply, “but we’ve had to touch down. We’re out of gas. We’ll talk to central command and leave again soon.”
A little disgusted, Bowersox put down the radio. Despite the breakthrough, the pilots still had no idea where to find Expedition Six. They could not be guided over that sort of distance by voices. And now they weren’t even in the air. But sore from lying across the lip of the hatch—and because he is the sort of man who would try to walk off polio—Bowersox finally mustered the strength to stand up, stretch his back, and take a few tentative steps.
Nearby, Pettit stayed put, only every so often attempting even to sit up, leaning on his elbows, but he kept busy all the same, thinking through a way to turn their parachute into a nifty shelter for the night.
Budarin, meanwhile, heard what he thought were cars speeding in the distance. He, too, forced himself to stand, loaded the shotgun, and began trotting in the direction of the noise, firing flares into the sky. They rained down in thick red clouds, but it turned out that Budarin had been hearing only gravity’s tides rolling in, and nobody came.
All the while, their beacon had begun sending its signal deep into space, past station, toward a satellite orbiting thousands of miles above the earth. And now that satellite had sent back the signal, like a father playing catch with his son.
· · ·
It was announced at TsUP that the faint sound of a beacon had been heard. Search planes were scrambling in its direction. But for both sides, that news was not met with any sort of enthusiasm. Beacons were one thing. Human beings were another. Plenty of times, parts of machines had survived when their crews had not. The Russians remembered that when the three members of the Salyut 1 crew had been lost, their capsule had been intact, and their beacon had sung out loud and clear. And even if the news of the beacon were true (the Americans weren’t so sure that it was), they knew that faint beacons had called out from places where men never could—sunk to the bottoms of oceans or trapped under ice. There was no way to know whether that high-pitched squeal was announcing an astronaut’s safe arrival to life on earth or his premature departure from it.
There was no way of knowing, either, what happiness or heartbreak the next phone call or announcement might bring. Though it remained largely unspoken, and for all of Readdy’s kind counsel, there was a feeling among some in those rooms—between O’Keefe and Pastorek, at least—that they would have to start talking about what would happen if the coin flipped heartbreak.
Casting nervous sideways glances at Micki and Annie, tearful and huddled together, O’Keefe wondered how they and NASA, and perhaps even America, could ever make it through such a loss. He began formulating the steps that he would take to try to save the women and the souls of their husbands and the dreams of Mars. But each time O’Keefe tried to find his way along the path to redemption, his sleeve got caught on a bramble or he lost his footing, and he had to start all over again. He never did reach the end. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to run through the logical course: shock, then sadness, then anger, and then a lifetime of grief.
Instead, he went out to sneak another cigarette, and to chew on his mustache, and to run his hands through his hair, and to pinch the bridge of his nose, and to rub his eyes. When it came right down to it, these were the only things he could do. It was all he had in his power. This was all he had left in him.
· · ·
Just when they began thinking that they would have to spend the night, cold on the flats, Expedition Six heard the screaming of jet engines. Brought to them by the signal, the first of fifteen search planes appeared high overhead, nothing more than a jagged shape against the still-bright sky, dipping its wings when it finally caught sight of them, three men laid out on the grass. The pilot radioed down.
“Sorry for the wait,” he said. “The helicopters are coming. The main helicopter is two hours away.”
“No rush,” Bowersox said back, and he meant it. For the first time in months, maybe even years, he could genuinely relax, his work finally done. “Say hello to our wives,” he said as dreamily as a man adrift at sea.
“The helicopters will be coming from the north,” the search pilot said.
“Tell us when they’re ten minutes away,” Bowersox said, nodding, mostly to himself. “We’ll make sure they see us.”
And with that, Expedition Six was all but over. All that was left was for Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit to disband. But not just yet.
Bowersox told his friends that their jobs were finished and they could be happy again. He put down the radio, fell back into the dirt, and closed his eyes. Budarin dropped the shotgun, and Pettit stopped mentally turning their parachute into a tent, and they joined Bowersox in his meditation. Together, they put their backs flat against the grass once more, watching again the white birds that continued to circle overhead. They smiled at the thought of holding their wives and children, of having a hot shower, of slipping into some clean clothes, of putting their heads on pillows and pulling blankets up under their chins. They looked forward to waking from deep, perfect sleeps to their old gravity-bound lives, to becoming the husbands and fathers they once were and soon would be again.
But they also savored the silence. They savored those last honest moments of being alone. And by the time the beat of the helicopter’s blades thumped over the horizon and the weight of the world had found their chests for the second time in the same afternoon, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit had each let his mind loose, floating, untethered, 250 miles up into the nothingness.
Each of them suddenly felt too far from home.
· · ·
Bill Gerstenmaier’s helicopter had returned to Astana for fuel. He had spent the past few hours hanging out of one of its windows, fruitlessly searching for Expedition Six. Now grounded and waiting for the gas tanks to fill, he had never been more desperate for a goldfish moment. Finally, the helicopter’s radio crackled.
Mike Foale—one of the Mir astronauts, flying in another of the helicopters as NASA’s representative—and American flight surgeon Mike Duncan were pleased to announce that they could see Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit, these three pale men who had turned into salvation. They were almost translucent in the sun, but they looked well and relaxed, as though they were in a shared trance. Foale and Duncan had waved down to them, and it took a moment for them to wave back, almost reluctantly. It looked as though they were waving goodbye rather than hello.
After their helicopter touched down on the grass, its wash blowing dust up and into the wind, Foale and Duncan joined the posse of soldiers, technicians, and medical personnel who had made the short run across to the astronauts. After some good-natured ribbing—What took you so long?—there were hugs and broad smiles. For Expedition Six, even the gentlest embrace felt like a vise, but it was a good kind of squeeze. It was something to see other faces.
Back in Astana, flush with joy and relief, Gerstenmaier remembered the anxious crowds waiting for his word in Moscow. He fired up his satellite phone and exalted in reporting a happy reunion: they have been found, and they have been seen, and they are very much alive.
His trembling voice was relayed through Houston and flung back toward two rooms in TsUP. In that magical instant, all of the time and all of the distance had finally disappeared, and the tension and anxiety and pain that had built up over five and a half terrible hours and however many miles was broken.
· · ·
The American delegation exploded in relief, Gerstenmaier’s phone call having lit some kind of fuse. There were tears and hugs and handshakes and backslaps. Micki collapsed into Annie’s arms. O’Keefe let loose with a victory howl. Readdy smiled and shook his head. Pastorek exhaled and put down his pen.
The Russians had also heard the news—as well as the roaring of the Americans—and emerged, cheering, from their own storm cellars. Having been divided by language and walls and now being united by celebration, the two camps met somewhere in the middle, in a massive conference room, the only room
at TsUP big enough to contain the elation. There were the universal expressions of ecstasy: smiles and laughter, more handshakes and hugs. And then, from nowhere, several bottles of clear, cold vodka were broken out.
Almost immediately, a series of Russian officials began tearing into long, elaborate speeches, each of which was punctuated with a toast, a cheer, and another shot of vodka. The Americans caught on to the routine fast enough, and soon the speeches grew shorter and the glasses more full. In no time at all, everybody in that loud, bursting room was some level of drunk.
There might have been something base-seeming about that, in capping something as spectacular as the return of three men from space with a mass downing of alcohol. But those bottles of vodka were more than simple pollution.
For the men of Expedition Six, there had been nobler outlets to vent the anxiety that had followed them down to the flats. They could find ecstasy in the green of the grass and inhale gallons of crisp, clean air and watch white birds. In short, they could find in themselves a more poetic finish because their journey had come to such a beautiful end. They had known all along that they were safe.
But for the people who had been waiting so anxiously for their arrival, the day’s final exclamation point had seemed less sweet. All they had been able to do was wait and worry, enduring hours spent tugged through a knothole. And while their own journeys had been just as dramatic as Expedition Six’s, because they were static, because there had been no thump that signaled that they had made it back alive, they had felt robbed somehow. They were celebrating an abstraction. For them, each shot of vodka was the only reminder that all of their waiting and worrying was over. Each overturned glass and unmopped spill made out like gravity did for Expedition Six: each gave their patrons a heavy kind of comfort, the collective understanding that everything was going to be okay.
The toasting session’s buzz continued long after the Americans had left to board a couple of minivans destined for Star City, where Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit would arrive in four or five hours. For the people smiling out from inside the convoy, that drive through the suburbs of Moscow and into the trees went both fast and slow. As much as they wanted to see the objects of their affection with their own eyes, part of them also wanted the dreamlike anticipation to last, knowing that what had been so far away for so long was now so close.