Waiting

by Stephen Jones

  Peabody, though, I noticed, kept looking up at the black sky, with a complex expression. Fear and longing at the same time, so I thought.

  Two hours thirty into the mission, I began our hunt for Zarya in earnest, with my first approach burn. The maneuver was on the money, as showed by the ground’s estimate and my own navigation sightings of stars and Earth’s horizon.

  I broke out chicken sandwiches, and awater gun that delivered half-ounce squirts into the mouth. “Over an hour until we begin the final approach phase. I take it Lovecraft Squad officers are allowed a lunch break?”

  She took the stuff without commenting.

  “You know,” I said, “the one thing I regret about having to make my secret flights is that I can’t tell anybody about this. The experience. Earth from space. I was raised on a cotton farm in Georgia. Big family. Lots of nieces I could tell it to.”

  She glanced at me. “I saw your file.”

  What file? Kept by who? I didn’t trouble to ask such questions.

  “I admit I only take in the relevant technical material. I remember you’re unmarried. Farm been in the family awhile?”

  “The first generation of Joneses who owned it were bought-out slaves. But I was never a farmer. Always distracted by flying, whenever I could get near it, the barnstormers at the shows. My family encouraged me. After a few years of crop-dusting and stunt flying, I took courses on commercial and military engines. I couldn’t get close to the military back then, not as a woman pilot, but I got some training on the Lears and de Havillands—civilian ships, but jets. And then I got signed up by Boeing as a test pilot. A lot less discrimination in the civilian sector.”

  She looked at me. “Over gender, or color?”

  “Both. Anyhow, with all that behind me, when there was talk of hiring women to train up as astronaut candidates—it was never official NASA policy, of course—I was in the box seat. Missed out on the Mercury 13, but I made the Blue Gemini 21. Joined the Air Force, officially. Blue Gemini is their covert program for the spacecraft, while NASA uses it to prepare for the Moon landings.”

  “And you got to fly in space.”

  “It turns out we’re useful,” I said dryly. “I’ve ambitions to fly on the MOL. You heard of that?”

  “Of course. The Manned Orbiting Laboratory. Space station for surveillance, supported by Gemini technology. Actually the League helps sponsor it.”

  “Why aren’t I surprised? The point is, you see, that male astronauts are would-be heroes; as soon as NASA picks them they get Time magazine deals and whatnot. Whereas the women are invisible, at best a token. A joke. And so if you want to hide away a couple of astronauts for forty days on a spy station, photographing Eastern Bloc sites with big old Dorian cameras—”

  “Make them women, because, unlike the men, nobody notices if they go missing.”

  “That’s the idea.” I decided to try a little fishing. “I guess the one benefit of all this covert spaceflight we seem to be running is that it’s giving more opportunities to pilots like me.”

  She shrugged. “I doubt if you know the half of it. Well, you’ve glimpsed some of it at Tarooma. . . . Look, the British alone have an extensive space program going back a couple of decades. All kick-started by the Germans’ wartime work, of course. We had our first artificial-satellite lunar orbiter back in 1950, the experimental Q-ships from 1953, and even a venture to Mars in 1956.”

  “Mars? Seriously?”

  “Didn’t go well. Meant to be a flyby—crashed—one man survived. Still up there. The type who’s always annoyingly useful on camping holidays. Now he’s doing archaeology! Needless to say the Russians and Americans have been beavering away just as busily, and with just as much mixed success.”

  “But the triumphs: Sputnik 1, supposedly the first satellite in orbit, Gagarin himself—”

  “Everybody is pretty miffed at the Soviets going public with all that. There isn’t really a space race as such, you see, because so much of it is hidden from the public. It’s more a race for prestige, for publicity. And the Soviets are cheating.”

  “Hmm. But right now they need our help to salvage this Zarya.”

  She seemed distracted. “I won’t bore you with details of my own career. Suffice it to say that I reached the top, at Oxford, in the WRAF and in the Human Protection League, because I was far better than the best of the men. Simple as that. There was no choice but to take me. Some day, you know, women will be elected purely on merit, for space missions as in everything else. I have a niece too. Bright as a button . . .”

  That was when she told me about Old Arkham. How she’d tried to take her niece up there, to that desolate place, as her parents had once shipped her.

  “Here we are—it’s 1963. I hope that by 1999 my niece is chief science officer on the first U.N. expedition to Venus. Or leading the investigation of the magnetic anomaly in Tycho.”

  I frowned. “Tycho, on the Moon?”

  “I said too much. How’s our rendezvous coming on?”

  Back to business.

  The mission milestones unfolded.

  Three hours after launch, the solar eclipse began. The Moon’s great shadow was already sweeping across the Earth.

  We paid attention only to the timing. The total duration of the eclipse would be five hours, with a couple of minutes of totality in the middle. We expected to be at the station in a couple of hours, leaving us thirty minutes before totality.

  At three hours fifty minutes after launch, we were in a circular orbit under Zarya’s track. Being lower, our orbital speed was faster, and we gradually overtook the target. After four and a half hours, I made another burn to raise our orbit, with intercept to follow thirty minutes later.

  When we were twenty-five miles below it, Zarya was a speck of light in the sky. My main job was to keep the ship’s nose pointing at the target. I measured the rate at which the nose rose up, relative to the horizon of the Earth; that kind of number gave me another way to estimate the closing distance and speed.

  “We won’t be able to dock with this thing. I suppose you have a key to the porch?”

  “So to speak,” Peabody murmured.

  I glanced at her. “Come on. Nobody here but us chickens. How? Soviet space secrets are notoriously hard to crack.”

  “We turned Doktor Merkwürdigliebe.”

  “Who?”

  “One of the Nazi rocket scientists who built the V-2. We got von Braun; the Soviets got Merkwürdigliebe. Nutty as a fruitcake. Anyhow the Zarya was pretty much his baby.”

  “So how did you get hold of him?”

  “The Americans promised him he could work on their nuclear weapons program.” She grinned. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  We closed on the station. In the final phase, Peabody helped me by reading out the numbers. “Eighty-three feet per second, two miles . . . forty-four fps, one and a half miles . . . eleven fps, three tenths of a mile . . .” Rendezvous is a precise art—basically you have to arrange it so that both range and relative velocity go to zero at the same time. An orderly process, and pleasing to me because of that.

  But I didn’t get it quite right, this time. In the final close we went into a whifferdill, a complicated spiral around the target. I had to fix it with blasts of my attitude thrusters. I am a professional; I was annoyed I wasted a little fuel, and irritated at my lack of precision.

  Peabody couldn’t care less. “As long as we still have enough for re-entry.” She pulled on her helmet and began to close up her suit, and she glanced up nervously at the sun.

  I looked through the smoked glass we’d brought for the purpose. I could see a substantial chunk of the sun had gone dark already. A clear geometry, a brilliant remnant crescent of sun—an eerie sight as we drifted beside that darkened station.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Peabody said.

  “Poyekhali!” I replied.

  She didn’t smile.

  III

  We were going to have to spacewalk over to the Zar
ya.

  Like everything else about this mission, the procedure was half-assed and not rehearsed at all. But at least, as the experienced astronaut, I was in charge. I’d even done an EVA before—an extravehicular activity—even if it was only to stick my helmeted head out of the hatch of a Blue Gemini, while my male colleague drifted around in space working an experimental atomic-radiation sensor.

  Anyhow, we put on our helmets and closed up our suits, and I pressed the button to open the valve that vented our cabin air. There was a soft sense of pressure as my suit inflated. I opened the hatches over our heads, and from the enclosure of the cabin my visual field unfolded, to reveal infinite space, pitch-black, a slice of blue Earth, and the dark mass of the Zarya only yards away.

  I opened my couch harness and turned to Peabody. “So you wait for me to come back and get you before you even take your seat belt off. Okay?”

  An impatient thumbs-up. Too polite to give me the finger, probably. God bless the British.

  I straightened up, stood on my couch, and pushed out into space.

  I trailed an umbilical line that attached me physically to the Gemini, and which contained an oxygen feed for my suit. But I also had an oxygen bottle dangling from my waist. We didn’t know what we were going to find in the Zarya, and couldn’t depend on there being breathable air.

  And, to help me move around, I had a reaction pistol, like a little portable maneuvering rocket. I hung onto the Gemini and squirted this a couple of times to test it.

  Then I turned my back on the Zarya, made sure my lines weren’t tangled up, and pulsed the gun a couple of times. It gave me a firm shove, and when I turned around again I was drifting across space toward the Soviet station.

  Compared to the tidy, somewhat tinselly and baroque NASA tech, Zarya looked heavy, crude. “Looks like it was made in a tractor factory.”

  “Just tell me what you see, Jones.”

  “It looks dead. No lights . . . I see three cylinders, attached lengthwise. They get fatter as you go down the body. The whole is, what, fifty feet long? The smallest cylinder must be about six feet across. Right where I’m heading.”

  “That’s where the EVA hatch is, and the airlock. Where we’ll enter.”

  “Copy that. There are antennae everywhere, and big solar panels folded out like an insect’s wings . . .”

  Insectile. That was one word for it. Antennae and wings. The hull was dark metal, like chitin, like the carapace of some great beetle. On the hull I could see bits of engineering, such as handrails for cosmonauts doing their own EVAs, I guessed. And . . .

  “I see runes, Peabody. Carved into the hull. Must have taken some effort to do that in zero-G. The reaction when you apply a torque—”

  “Skip the John Glenn patter. What kind of runes?”

  “Like stars. Five-pointed. Like pentagrams.”

  “Five-pointed. You’re sure?”

  “I can count. Coming up on that EVA hatch now. Oh, there’s one more element, a big old ugly sphere attached to the end of the stack.”

  “That’s the crew return capsule. The Soviets are developing a three-crew ship, the Voskhod. Haven’t flown the thing yet. Not officially anyhow. They flew up their crew one by one in Vostoks, but this is for the return.”

  “Three crew, then. Including Gagarin.”

  “Yes. If they’re still alive, we have food packs and med supplies to treat them. And we’re to stuff them inside that recovery capsule and send them home. But to achieve that we’re going to have to go in and find out what’s what. Jones, those three chambers. Probably sealed-off from each other. We’ll have to clear them one by one.”

  “Understood.”

  I reached Zarya.

  I sailed close enough to the hull now to grab a handrail, on that narrowest cylinder. A part of me flinched as I made physical contact with the station, but it was just metal, in the shadows, cold through my gloves.

  I worked my way around the cylinder until I got to the EVA hatch. It had labeled instructions in Cyrillic that meant nothing to me, but there was a big red wheel whose function was obvious. I turned it, it stuck a little before it gave, and soon I had that hatch swinging open sweet as a nut. Inside, the airlock was a dark little cave. I wasn’t about to go in there alone, nor was I about to say so out loud.

  I swung back out into the light. “Okay, Peabody, all is copacetic here. I’ll tie-off the umbilical and come back to get you.”

  And as I guided her along the cord across that stretch of space, mostly trying to avoid tying ourselves in knots with our various umbilicals, it did not surprise me at all that she insisted on carrying over her case of “specialist medical supplies.”

  At the station we disconnected our umbilicals from the Gemini, tested the sweet juice from our suits’ oxygen bottles, pulled ourselves inside that airlock, and closed the hatch.

  I was in the mouth of the whale.

  We flooded the lock with air and I tried to open the inner hatch. The next red wheel was stiff, heavy, an over-engineered chunk of Soviet tech. When it cracked at last, around its edge I could see light—green-filtered sunlight—and what looked like branches. Tree branches, like pines, bristling with needles.

  I could hear the branches rustle.

  I glanced at Peabody. “Sounds as if there’s air in there, at least.”

  “Let me check it out.” She had a simple sensor attached to her chest unit that she inspected.

  Meanwhile, still fully suited-up, with my reaction gun dangling at my waist, I drifted through the hatch and into . . . green.

  Look, I’m from Georgia. I’m no expert on the northern forests. But I recognized pine, larch, spruce, cedar, all growing out of pots of earth fixed to the metal walls. There were even fruit bushes; I thought I recognized cranberries, blueberries, big and swollen. An incongruous place to be in a spacesuit.

  Wan sunlight filtered through lichen-smeared portholes into this crowded vivarium. I wondered uneasily how close we were to the totality of the eclipse.

  “It’s safe to crack your helmet,” Peabody called.

  I did so. I lifted the helmet off my head, let it dangle at my waist on a cord, and took a cautious sniff. I smelled rot, like bad compost maybe. “I’m still alive.”

  Peabody nodded. I noticed she kept her own helmet on.

  I pushed deeper into the green. “Wow. Looks like a bonsai laboratory. What’s the tree stock, Canadian?”

  “Not Canadian. Siberian. Specifically, flora from the Tunguska region.”

  I fumbled to pick a blueberry with my gloved hands, tried again. The fruit was huge, soft and mushy. Some zero gravity effect, I thought at the time. “Tunguska?” I had to search my memory for the reference. “Where the comet fell? Flattened all those trees. In . . .”

  “1908. The Soviets have always done experiments on life in space. Plants, animals.”

  I remembered. “Like that poor dog they put in orbit. Laika? More famous than Lassie, for a while. Funny how they never admitted they had no way to bring her back to Earth.”

  “That was the cover story, yes.”

  “Why bring Tunguska trees?”

  “There was a reason. Are you going to eat that blueberry?”

  I looked at the fruit doubtfully. It was huge, but looked swollen, almost to the point of being rotten. “What, am I a lab rat now?”

  She just waited.

  I bit into the fruit. It was bitter, sickly bitter, and the texture was like mold. Disgusting, literally. I spat out the mouthful of flesh and dumped the berry.

  And as I was telling Peabody about this, I thought I saw a figure, deeper inside that small, forest-choked chamber. A tall shadow.

  Peabody was making a note on a pad attached to her suit sleeve. “Abnormal fruiting is typical of Color Incursions. In Lovecraft’s account of the 1882 incident—”

  “Peabody. I think I see somebody. At the rear of the compartment.”

  “Moving?”

  “No.” And the more I looked at it, the less human
it seemed—a tall shape in the green, a suggestion of a head, of limbs . . .

  The hell with it. I pulled my way zero-gravity style through that Siberian foliage, toward the figure.

  You think I’m exaggerating, for dramatic tension maybe. Maybe you’re looking at a plan of the station as you read this. It was an expedition of only a few feet.

  But believe me it felt a lot farther than that. Partly, it was the way I had to push through that toy forest, I guess. But there was something subtler at work, inside that station. Distances were deceptive, deeper, or sometimes shallower, than they ought to have been. One of the League’s C.I.D. double-domes who debriefed me later said the interior volume might have been “non-Euclidean.” Look it up—I had to. Space in there was distorted, the way Einstein describes the whole universe. It was “characteristic of incursion architecture,” the scientist told me.

  Well, I got through my miniature odyssey, and boldly faced that figure.

  Which was, when I got close to it, not human at all. It was kind of like a scarecrow, built around a coverall—blue, tagged with Russian lettering— that looked to have been roughly packed with clothing and other garbage to make a barrel torso. But the top of it, the “head,” was made from a cut-open, splayed-out packing case, like a plastic flower, as was the base, the “feet.” Bits of cable were draped about, suggestive of arms, or tentacles maybe. And plastic sheeting was draped behind this thing, like halffolded angel wings.

  This was, I saw now, only one of a row of several of such figures, all roughly human-sized or larger, all evidently improvised from the ship’s stores. I’d never seen anything like them. And yet they looked vaguely familiar. I couldn’t explain that feeling then, and I’m not sure if I can now.

  Peabody came to join me. I was floating in the air at the far-left end of this row, with Peabody more central, to my right. She still wore her helmet. These dispositions turned out to be crucial to what followed.

  “Somebody’s been busy,” I said.

  “The cosmonauts,” she said. “Clearly. Obsessed by visions, dreams they could not understand. Trying to realize them in the waking world. Again, this is typical of such incursions.” She touched the topknot of one of the crude sculptures, the splayed casing. “See? Five-fold symmetry. Like a starfish. And the base too.”