Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  And then a short walk, carrying your portable air unit to the van, which will drive you to the pad itself.

  That was when I met Peabody. She was already in the van, suited up as I was, with her own air unit on the bench beside her. She was around forty; through the glass of her visor I glimpsed a strong face, a handsome Roman nose, blue eyes. The drivers were in a sealed cabin up front.

  There was one other in there with us. A man, shorter than either of us, in a loose environment suit of his own—sealed up, but not vacuum-ready. That’s protocol; you’re supposed to protect your astronauts from infection before a flight. My sharp pilot’s eyes read the tag on his chest: GARDNER, DR. MAXWELL EDISON, alongside a British flag. I figured the guy was around forty also; he had a weasely look, and he was hunched over, like he was underfed.

  And he had a kind of valise at his side, leather and metal, of which I was immediately suspicious. In fact I thought I recognized it.

  The van rolled off.

  “Officer Peabody,” I said, to break the ice. “We talked on the phone. Good to meet you.” I went to bump her gloved fist with mine; she went to shake hands, and we had an awkward laugh at transatlantic misunder-standings.

  “Likewise,” she said. “On such a momentous day.” She waved a hand at our companion. “Dr. Gardner is a friend and colleague. ”

  “Ain’t too much room in that old Gemini for a passenger.”

  “Indeed not. Maxwell is here to transfer the package he’s carrying. Specialist medical supplies, for treating Gagarin and his colleagues in the Zarya station, if they survive. Security protocols. Those Soviets, you know.”

  Specialist medical supplies my ass.

  That name sounded familiar, though. Gardner. I dug in a pouch on my leg and pulled out a battered, lurid pulp magazine. Amazing Stories, September 1927. “This was the only bit of briefing material you sent me, about the HPL side of the mission.”

  “Lovecraft’s account of the 1882 event.” She smiled. “What did you make of it?”

  “Weird. Insane.”

  “But the truth,” she said quietly.

  “Gardner, though. That’s the name in the story.”

  “You’re correct, Captain Jones,” Gardner said. “My great-grandfather was Nahum Gardner, whose farm was the center of the event. The 1882 ‘Color Incursion,’ as it’s called by the League.

  “My grandfather was Nahum’s fourth son. Sickly, even before the Color Incursion. Got sent away as an infant, to an aunt in Boston, and raised there. And was kind of forgotten. Never mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft’s account, although he always claimed he dreamed it, like so many of his so-called ‘stories.’ After the deaths, what was left of the family came back to England; they were only a couple of generations out of the old country. But we remembered Nahum’s story. After majoring in medicine, well, I got drawn back to the strange family history. I even did a placement at Miskatonic U.”

  If I was looking for sanity and reassurance from Peabody I wasn’t going to get it.

  She said now, “I did a placement at Miskatonic also. And as you know, while I am a serving officer in the WRAF, I also hold a senior position in the League, or what we like to call ‘The Lovecraft Squad’ around here, an international affiliation. This flight is a joint RAF-USAF-HPL mission, in fact. Judging from the fragmentary data we have, the ongoing situation in Zarya is thought to share some similarities with the 1882 incident. You’ll learn more in the next few hours. Need to know, however.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  Gardner’s accent was, to my ears, a neutral British. But now he surprised me by breaking into what sounded like a convincing New England twang. “Jest a color . . . an’ it burns an’ sucks . . . it come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors said so . . . he was right . . . ” He grinned at me, as if anticipating my reaction.

  Peabody glared at him. “He’s quoting the Lovecraft piece. Stop showing off, man. You know, your handlers are well aware how you use your connections. Dribbling classified information for a bit of notoriety, is that the game?”

  Gardner, unperturbed, kept grinning at me. “I do know some famous people. Spooky stuff is fashionable. Dirk McQuickly says he’ll write a song about me some day.”

  Peabody shook her head impatiently. “We’re there. Thank Him.”

  The van drew up at a launch gantry.

  We climbed out into dim but dazzling sunshine. Above us loomed the familiar slim profile of a Titan, an ICBM crudely adapted to carry humans to orbit, and with the complex cone-shape of a Gemini capsule on the top.

  As we took our short walk to the elevator that would take us up to the spacecraft itself, we passed a Perspex cordon plastered with logos from previous flights. I found myself staring at mementos of launches by something called the British Experimental Rocket Group: the Q-I, 1953; the M-76, 1956; the Q-II, 1958. . . . Beyond the barrier, techs and other workers desultorily clapped for us astronauts. Farther out I saw a few Aborigines, dressed in T-shirts and shorts and leaning on brooms. They weren’t clapping.

  At the foot of the rocket, waiting for us behind the barrier, stood a senior RAF officer with a couple of nervous-looking aides. He must have been midseventies, with a crimson face obscured by a huge white handlebar moustache. In his ornate uniform, he looked like he’d been inflated.

  “The ceremonial bit.” I could almost hear Peabody gritting her teeth as she led us forward. “Marshal. How good of you to come see us off in person.”

  He stepped forward to greet us, and would have caromed off the Perspex if an aide hadn’t stopped him. “Ah, quite right, quite right, no touchy feely, eh? Privilege to know you’ll be flying the flag in the great beyond, Officer Body.”

  “Peabody, sir—”

  “And here’s your copilot.”

  “Strictly speaking, sir—”

  “Ah, how I envy you. Once it was my privilege to fly to Heaven and back, eh? . . .”

  An aide hurried him away.

  We made it to the comparative haven of peace that was the gantry elevator—just me, Peabody, and Gardner with his package. The open cage began to rise with a whir, and the Red Center opened up around us.

  “Sorry about that,” Peabody murmured. “He was a First World War flying ace, and he still is a First World War flying ace, if you see what I mean. Old bugger won’t retire, but he’s been shuffled off into this wilderness where, they think, he can do little damage.”

  “His day is done,” Gardner said brutally. “Old warriors like that, with their nice clear wars to fight. Well-defined enemies. Hasn’t got a clue about the modern day. Only here as a PR front, a distraction.”

  “He’s harmless,” Peabody said. “‘To Heaven and back.’” She laughed. “Good old Flasheart. Drives Prof Q. crazy.”

  “Speaking of PR,” Gardner said, “what a shame for you that the Soviets sent up Tereshkova just last month. First public announcement of a space flight by a female.”

  That, at least, was one public untruth I was aware of. I shrugged. “I’d rather have the flying than the fame.”

  At the top of the gantry a couple of techs in coveralls waited to load us into the capsule. A Gemini is kind of like a very small boat, a conical body with a big circular heatshield at the rear and a cylindrical docking unit for a nose, all stood on its end. The two crew climb in through hatches and squeeze in side by side, into couches you won’t be leaving, aside from walks in space, until you return to Earth, and there’s barely room for the two of you in your pressure suits.

  The techs gave us thumbs-ups when they were done. But at the last second Maxwell Gardner muscled in and passed over that “medical pack,” which Peabody stuck in her foot-well. Then he handed her a slip of paper, which I guessed was some kind of authorization code. I was increasingly certain what that package was.

  And then they put their heads together, faceplate to faceplate. They seemed to murmur something like a prayer, of which I caught only a couple of words: Great Azat
hoth. If I’d had a glimmer about what that meant, I’d have got off that bus there and then.

  Gardner withdrew. I never saw him again, from that day to this. Read about his trial for serial homicide, though.

  In a Gemini, you actually have to duck down to avoid your head being cracked when they close the hatches.

  The Tarooma controllers walked us through a checklist, every detail familiar to me from my two previous Blue Gemini flights. But the damn list was mostly handwritten. That’s how loose this whole thing was.

  We settled into our home away from home. We were tight in there, in our little boat. We had to connect oxygen hoses and comms lines to our chest panels, and parachute harnesses to our suits in case the launch failed. The oxygen from a Gemini feed doesn’t taste the same as from the support packs; it has an antiseptic tang.

  “So,” Peabody said to me. “Here we are heading for Zarya.”

  “Zarya. You mentioned that name.”

  “The space station—that’s spring in Russian.” Stiff in her suit, she looked over at me. “Everything is on a need to know basis, as I said. Our orders are to rendezvous with the station, assess the situation, save Gagarin and any surviving colleagues, and take any further appropriate action.”

  I shrugged. “Sounds straightforward. However . . .” I tapped a button that shut off our downlink comms. “Just us, Officer Peabody. Before we launch. Tell me why you brought a backpack nuke on board my spacecraft.”

  She just glared at me.

  “Come on, Peabody. I’m USAF, remember. I recognize the model. RAF issue, is it?”

  She gave in, icily. “Royal Marines, actually.”

  “So the ‘appropriate action’ of your orders includes taking out the space station with an atomic bomb? You see, my problem is this: when you approached me, I looked up the Human Protection League, as best I could. Asked around. And one thing I know for sure is they’re opposed to the use of nukes in orbit. For fear of—what? For stirring up trouble from outer space?”

  “Actually, more likely from inner space, the oceans . . . Oh, hell, Jones. Look—I’m both WRAF and HPL, remember. And believe me, there was a high level debate between those two services about the necessity to carry this nuke on such a mission. In the end, the armed forces won the argument. Global security against the outside threat, you see.”

  “But you accepted the mission even so. Despite your HPL conscience.”

  “Even so. Look, I was in the League long before I thought of joining the armed forces. Recruited by a tutor who picked me out when I was a student at Lonsdale, actually. My Oxford college. Jones, think of me as like a pacifist who nevertheless sees the logic of fighting a particular war— against the Nazis, say, or other, more dangerous groups—a war that had to be waged. That’s me, do you see? I have clear orders from my command chain in the WRAF as to when and why I should trigger the nuke. And if the situation arises, I will do so. Can you not see that the logic of its use will be all the more compelling if I choose to make such a call—I, a member of the Lovecraft Squad?”

  I studied her. On the surface, it was as if she’d opened up to me. But I still didn’t trust her. I just knew there was more to come. More layers. “Anyhow, our prime objective is to save Gagarin.”

  “Gagarin, yes. And you need to be prepared for him.” She dug a small tape recorder from a suit pouch. “This is a downlink taped at an American communications station on the Canaries—part of their global network. We’re not sure if he was even intending to broadcast it . . .” She pressed a button.

  I heard a hollowness, an echoing. That was my first impression, before I separated out any specific sounds. Then there was a kind of scratching.

  “Like tree branches against the window,” I blurted. “When I was a kid—”

  “I know. Keep listening.”

  Now a human voice, evidently a man’s, but a husky whisper, heavily distorted by the lousy radio link. A lot of panting, as if he were in pain, or exhausted.

  “I can’t tell the language. Russian? But I can hear it’s broken up.”

  “Russian indeed, and difficult even for native speakers to translate. There are few complete sentences, and what there are seem to be oddly constructed. Many in a passive mode. About how things are done, rather than something doing those things, you see?” She consulted notes on a pad attached to her sleeve. “Things are moved and changed, and fluttered. Ears hear sounds which are not wholly sounds. Eyes see colors which are not true colors. Something was taken away from him. He was being drained. Nothing was ever still in the night. The walls, the station partitions, shifted and changed. The very shape of the station was restless.” She glanced at me. “As you may have guessed, based on our fragmentary information to date, the phenomena we’re dealing with here do seem to show some correlation with the 1882 incident Lovecraft reported.”

  “You mean the Amazing Stories yarn?”

  “Nothing Lovecraft wrote was fictional,” she said bluntly.

  Listening to Gagarin, I thought I picked out a word, or phrase, repeated over and over. “What’s that he’s saying? Sounds like Tiger Lily?”

  She frowned. “Some of the analysts think that’s Poyekhali. What Gagarin famously said as he was launched in Vostok One: ‘Let’s go!’”

  I looked at her. “Whereas you think it is—”

  “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” When she said this her tone of voice changed, became an odd, caw-like cry. She coughed. “Which has other significance. Anyhow, you can tell that the man is in serious trouble. Or was.”

  “Was?”

  “These recordings are weeks old. Since then, we’ve had no communications of any sort. Even the automated telemetry is failing, apparently.”

  “Any reason why the Russians aren’t up there saving their own?”

  “Pad explosion at Baikonur. They can’t fly, not before the eclipse deadline.”

  “And so they asked for help from their mortal enemies? They sanctioned this mission?”

  “Let’s say they’re aware of it,” she said, British-dry.

  Meanwhile the countdown had continued, all but unnoticed, without a hold. That Titan is a reliable beast.

  We got to twelve, eleven, ten. The whole bird shuddered. Peabody looked faintly alarmed.

  I was the veteran here, in the left-hand pilot’s seat; I considered ribbing her about “need to know,” but I’m too good-hearted. “Gimbal tests,” I said. “Rocket nozzles swiveling this way and that. Shakes the whole stack.”

  Eight. Seven.

  “Grab that D-ring.”

  “What D-ring?”

  “Between your legs. Operates the ejection seat.”

  “Ejection seat? Him in the Gulf!”

  Five. Four.

  And she said softly, “Tri. Dva. Odin. We’re coming, Yuri.”

  I hear the fuel pumps throb into life.

  The pushback is gentle at first. Then there are more jolts as the thrust nozzles gimbal, twisting this way and that in an ongoing effort to keep the whole damn tower balancing on a pencil of flame. The noise begins now, a rattle, a deeper thrum you feel in your chest. Then the pogoing, vibrations along the length of the stack that throw you back and forth. I laugh, cruelly. “Poyekhali, Officer Peabody!”

  But she just mutters, over and over, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! . . .”

  We go supersonic and smooth out. The Gs reach a peak of four or five.

  Then the first stage cuts. An instant of surreal peace: no weight, and the air is filled with debris, with loose or lost bolts and shreds of sealing putty and scraps of paper. Which all rains down around you as the second stage cuts in.

  At last, it’s over: flame-out.

  I glance out the window, at the spent booster stage tumbling past, and I look at the mission clock. “Five minutes fifty-four seconds from the pad. Five hundred thirty miles downrange. Speed seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per hour. We are in orbit, Officer Peabody.”

  She’s peering out at a sunlit Earth. “The place where th
ere is no darkness.”

  II

  My passenger was anxious about time.

  That eclipse was setting us a deadline, for reasons I had yet to understand. Lovecraftian logic, no doubt. Anyhow, we needed to rendezvous with a Russian space station, deal with whatever the hell mess we found in there, and get out again, all within the next five hours, because five hours from the moment of our orbit injection was going to be totality of the eclipse.

  For a good while, all I could tell Peabody was that everything was going as planned. Happily she was an experienced flyer, if not an astronaut, and she’d been briefed well. She knew that spaceflight imposes its own constraints, and that chasing another craft in orbit was going to take its own sweet time.

  We checked out the systems of our sturdy spacecraft, following the checklist: the oxygen tank, the fuel cells. I blipped the attitude thrusters, beefy little rockets that sounded like a punch on the hull when they fired. We had patient, expert support from mission control at Tarooma, as relayed by comms stations on islands and ships around the world. For me the Tarooma voices were an unaccustomed mixture of American and British accents with the odd Australian nasal twang.

  Our call sign was Angel. We were on a mission of mercy, officially.

  I stole a few glances out the window. This was my third mission in a Gemini, and you never tired of the view: the jet black above, the rind of atmosphere on the horizon, and the dazzling view down below, bright as a tropical sky. I always liked the ocean, myself—the shallows at the fringes of the continents and around the islands, where you get complex waves and reflections, easily visible from space. There’s my sense of pattern again. Remember the Roman road?