Asimov's SF, February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  McFerson hit the controls before Richard could reach them. Or maybe the pilot had done so from inside the cockpit. He wasn't sure.

  The bay doors slid open, and there it was—the grappler—long bits of metal curving out toward the edges of the solar system, unfiltered sunlight reflecting off them, so bright that he wanted to look away.

  But he didn't. Because in the center was something whitish gray. Whitish gray and long, like a man's body would be, only the knees were slightly bent and so were the arms.

  Richard let out a small breath and it sounded like a sigh of relief. Or maybe he'd heard the sigh through his communications equipment, coming from someone else.

  The grappler's arms came closer to the door than he would have liked. Richard swung out, as he'd been trained to do, keeping his magnetized boots on the floor and one hand on the handle. McFerson did the same from the other side.

  The suit had pockmarks and one large hole that went through the middle of one leg, but it was mostly intact. It faced away from them. Richard recognized the oxygen equipment, so bulky it made the original astronauts look as if they were about to topple over backward.

  "Wow,” McFerson said.

  Richard didn't say anything. He had to be cautious as well. He was less worried about himself—he knew that if he lost his grip and his magnetization he would tumble into space, but someone would get him—than he was about breaking the Needle.

  Someone, at the beginning of this mission, had called the Needle a corpsicle, and, while Richard vehemently objected to the characterization, it had some truth. This body was breakable the way ice was breakable. Grab it wrong, and a part would snap off.

  Richard reached inside the grappler and slid a hand underneath the arm closest to him. Then he gently pulled backward. McFerson did the same.

  The grappler moved with them—Greg was letting them control the speed. It had reached the mouth of the doorway when McFerson said, “Lift up."

  There wasn't really an up—only an imagined up—but Richard didn't question. He'd done simulations and he knew, in this case, up meant toward the top part of the door.

  He lifted just in time to get the Needle's bent feet past the lip of the dart.

  "God,” Richard breathed. “That was close."

  McFerson said nothing. He used both hands to hold the Needle. Richard did the same, keeping one hand on the Needle's chest, bracing it, and the other under the Needle's arm.

  "Got him,” McFerson said, even though Richard hadn't given him a go-ahead.

  The grappler fingers loosened, and Richard held fast, using only his boots for balance.

  The grappler slid out of the bay.

  "Close doors,” McFerson said, and he didn't sound as calm as he had before.

  The doors eased shut, and they were inside the bay, holding a man frozen in position fifty years ago.

  Rachel hurried over, awkward in her magnetized boots.

  She joined them, bracing the body, and helping them move it toward the center of the bay. Richard could hear her breathe. She was frightened—or maybe awed—he couldn't tell.

  He couldn't tell how he felt either, except that somewhere in the middle of this mess, the object he had called the Needle had become a body.

  He was holding one of the astronauts from Apollo 8. His theory had been right.

  They had evacked.

  And he still had two more to find.

  * * * *

  But this one entranced him.

  It had a name, sewn onto the exterior of the space suit. Lovell. That made sense to Richard. Everyone else expected the first one out of the capsule to be the lowest ranking astronaut on the mission, but Richard knew better.

  Borman wouldn't have gone first. He would have stayed with his vessel as long as possible. Lovell, the daredevil former test pilot, who saw himself at equal rank with Borman, would go first to show it could be done.

  To show all three that fear could be conquered.

  It wouldn't have been right to send the rookie out first.

  The bubble-shaped helmet was intact. That was the first thing Richard looked for as he, Rachel, and McFerson eased the body away from the bay doors. The helmet was intact and the body inside had mummified.

  It looked like the mummies that came from Egyptian tombs—after the poor things had been unwrapped. The face was hard and leathery, the eyes gone, the mouth open in some kind of rictus.

  But worse than that, this one was burned.

  Richard had been told to expect radiation burns, but he wasn't sure how they'd show up. They showed up in patches, holes in the skin.

  "Good thing we got him,” Rachel said. “I don't know how many more decades these suits would hold up."

  Richard didn't respond. The suits would hold up as long as they remained intact. Obviously, the hole in the leg of this one came so late that there was no more oxygen, no more environment inside it.

  When they reached the far wall and had the body face down over the examination table that would hold it, he said, “Now we can have gravity. Bring it up slowly."

  "Roger,” the pilot said.

  Then Richard felt a buoyancy he hadn't even realized he had vanish. He was heavier, and his ankles ached from the boots. The body in his hands slowly settled onto the table, face down, the large backpack upward.

  "Let's get him recorded,” Richard said.

  Recorded. Saved for posterity.

  It was time to call in Dail.

  Richard told the pilot to have Dail watch from the screens outside the cargo bay.

  The recording and cataloguing was mostly a job for the scientists, and once Richard stepped back from the body, he would let them go at it. But he made some notes of his own.

  The way the boots shone in the bay's lights. The still-bent limbs. The face, unrecognizable. And the suit, as familiar as the one he wore, because he used to stare at the ones in the Smithsonian.

  Puffy and bulky, unbelievably difficult to maneuver, this suit had somehow protected Jim Lovell's body for half a century. The gloves made his hands look almost small.

  The helmet with its thick plastic built to resemble glass. The old American flag on the arm, with only fifty stars—no Puerto Rico yet—making this seem like a suit lost to time.

  And yet so real.

  Richard could feel the suit's solidness through his own gloves, knew that some of that came from the frozen corpse inside.

  He thought of the outcries on the original mission, the fact that they were desecrating a grave. No one felt that way any more. He doubted anyone much thought of the Apollo 8 astronauts any more.

  Yet here was one, big as life. They would think about them once again, at least for a while.

  Richard hadn't carried Jim Lovell, still alive, from the capsule. Nor had he brought the man into the dart with a fireman's carry, hoping to retrieve a long lost soul.

  But he'd done the best he could.

  Maybe the only thing he could.

  * * * *

  The buoyancy Richard had felt just before the gravity had turned back on never really vanished. He felt buoyant still, as if something lifted him ever upward.

  When they brought the dart back, and he'd finished all the interviews (How had you known where the astronaut was, Mr. Johansenn? Is it worth the expense, bringing a long dead man to Earth? Why didn't you consult the families?), he went back to ACP-S to consult with Tolemy.

  "How hard do you think it'll be to find the other two?” Richard asked.

  Tolemy shrugged. He looked a bit more haggard than he had before the mission. He'd had a lot at stake on the mission's success, but it didn't look as if the success had helped him. If anything it seemed to have depressed him.

  "I've been thinking about it a lot,” Tolemy said. “I'm pretty sure it'll be harder."

  "Harder?” Richard hadn't expected that answer. He'd thought Tolemy would tell him it would be easier now that they knew what to look for. “In addition to the orbit we mapped for the capsule, you have two more
points—the place where we found Lovell and the place where we found the capsule. You can make some kind of grid. We'll know in general what region of space the other two will be in."

  "I've already done that,” Tolemy said.

  He ran his fingers along his console, brought up a new screen with the Moon and Mars and the rest of the solar system. An entire area between Venus and Mars was colored in red.

  "That's the probable zone,” he said. “But here's the problem."

  He overlaid a green bubble, even larger, on top of the red.

  "We made some assumptions to find Lovell. We assumed that we were getting the first astronaut at the last possible evac point. We assumed that they waited until the very end to evac. But what if Lovell waited until the end? What if the other two went days ahead of him? What if he planned to stay in the capsule and changed his mind at the last minute?"

  Richard shook his head. “He wouldn't do that."

  "You don't know that,” Tolemy said. “Any more than I know which direction the astronauts went when they stepped out of the capsule. More than likely, it was tumbling slightly. They could have gone in any direction, with any kind of speed. If anything, the search area is now bigger. We'll defeat ourselves if we only look in the red part."

  "It can't be bigger,” Richard said. “We know some of the path now. That narrows it."

  Tolemy shook his head. “I watched the vids you made of the rescue. You were worried about losing Lovell, about sending him off the small path you'd charted for him just by venting atmosphere from your cargo bay. Imagine if some other ship had done that. Or if a small rock had hit with enough force to push him in a completely different direction without making a hole in his suit. Or if he had vented oxygen on purpose, propelling himself in a particular direction to give himself a sense of control? We don't know. I don't think we'll ever know."

  Richard leaned over and shut off the map on Tolemy's screen. This was not the man he'd seen before the mission. That man had been certain of his numbers, worried that he'd made the wrong assumptions, but sure enough of himself to insist that his bosses bring in Richard.

  "What's changed?” Richard asked gently. He tried to control his impatience. He didn't like interpersonal relations—he'd never been that good at them. He usually let his staff handle that.

  Tolemy glanced at him, about to say “nothing.” In fact, the word had formed in his lips when something in Richard's face must have stopped him.

  "It was just luck,” Tolemy said. “Finding Lovell. It was luck."

  Like the press had been saying. Like Tolemy's boss had said when the mission came back, mostly because he couldn't take credit for a mission he hadn't approved of.

  "You said it,” Tolemy said. “We found a needle in a galaxy full of haystacks."

  "Because we looked,” Richard said. “Most people would hear the odds and give up. But we looked."

  Tolemy gave him a frightened glance. “It took ten years of round-the-clock work by some of the best minds, and it was me that found him. The new kid."

  "The new kid who worked harder than everyone else,” Richard said. “The kid who believed in himself."

  Tolemy shook his head. “That's the thing. After the mission left, I didn't believe any more. I was so convinced that all you would find was space debris that I nearly fell apart. If someone had died up there —"

  "It would have been on my head,” Richard said. “Not yours."

  Tolemy nodded, but Richard could tell the young man didn't believe him. Tolemy wasn't willing to accept his success.

  Richard stood, his patience nearly gone. He started to turn away, and then he stopped as an idea hit him.

  "This has been part of your imagination for a long time, hasn't it?” he asked.

  Tolemy looked up at him. Richard hadn't noticed before, but Tolemy was balding right at his crown. He didn't look quite so young any more.

  "What has?” Tolemy asked.

  "Finding one of the astronauts. You'd imagined it, you dreamed of it, you just didn't expect to do it."

  Tolemy bit his lower lip, then shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I didn't."

  Richard patted that shoulder. “Neither did I. And yet we did it, didn't we?"

  Tolemy frowned, as if the idea were new to him. Richard walked away, hoping that little talk would be enough. Tolemy had a gift, whether he realized it or not. That imagination, that way of looking at the solar system, at the small details, was unique.

  Richard doubted he could find that combination again.

  * * * *

  Part Three: 2020

  And he didn't, at least not in the next two years. Tolemy tried to find Anders and Borman, but flamed out quickly. Six months after the success of the Lovell mission, as the press called it, Tolemy took an extended leave. Then he quit, citing personal reasons.

  His staff asked Richard if he would talk to the young man. Tolemy had quite a talent, they said. It would be a shame to let him go.

  But Richard knew better than to keep him.

  Some men couldn't handle achieving their dreams. Tolemy was one of them.

  Even men like Richard, who could handle it, had a difficult time. No one had ever told him that success—real personal success—carried its own stresses.

  He'd always thought he'd understood that. After all, he'd bootstrapped himself into one of the richest men in the world. But those successes meant nothing to him. They were side issues on the way to his real goal—finding Apollo 8.

  That success had been bittersweet. He'd found the capsule and not the men, and yet he had done what he had set out to do.

  Just as he had done with Lovell.

  Two successes. Two important successes.

  But maybe he was insulated against those successes as he had been insulated against the earlier ones. Maybe he wouldn't have the same problem Tolemy had until he discovered Borman and Anders.

  If he could even find Borman and Anders.

  The remaining researchers at ACP-S worked the grids that Tolemy had left and found nothing. A few worked outside those grids and found nothing.

  They hadn't even found anything that was possible.

  Richard was thinking of firing the entire team and installing a new one when he got a personal phone call from the Chinese ambassador to the United States.

  "Mr. Johansenn,” the man said in perfectly accented English, “we have some information we would like to trade."

  His advisors told him to set up the meeting through the United States government, that going around them to the country that former President Rockefeller had once called the most dangerous nation on Earth might get Richard into legal trouble. If he ended up making an unapproved trade with them for secret technology, he might even be charged with espionage.

  Richard didn't see China as the most dangerous nation on Earth. They were merely a larger and politically more repressive nation. He also knew that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1979, the United States had substituted China for the U.S.S.R. in its foreign policy. The big evil superpower now was China, and nothing Richard or the Chinese did would change that.

  He told only his chief of staff that he was going to the embassy in Washington D.C. He decided to meet the ambassador there to prove to his own government (should they inquire) that he had nothing to hide. He could always say, with utter truth, that they had called him; he was just curious enough to go.

  The Chinese Embassy looked no different than the other embassies on Embassy Row. They were all stately buildings, with armed guards and formidable security. The only differences were the flags and the uniforms. The Chinese Embassy had its large red flag, that would have seemed festive if Richard hadn't seen so many movies in which the flag had featured menacingly. The guards wore austere greenish uniforms that made him think of robots in early forties movies. They also wore small caps that hid the shape of their skulls, and carried AK-47s over their shoulders in a display of force.

  Richard had to go through three levels of security just to
get into the building. Even then, he seemed to have acquired three guards all to himself.

  He wasn't even carrying a briefcase. There was nowhere to hide weaponry on his person, and besides, they'd searched him enough to find even the smallest bomb.

  The interior made him feel as if he'd entered another land. The furniture was ornate and mostly wood, all of it antiques from various dynasties. Expensive vases were filled with cherry blossoms. Tapestries hung on the wall behind the vases.

  Richard had been raised with the impoverished—and austere—Soviets as the Evil Empire. He wasn't used to the Chinese mixture of ancient beauty and hidden power within the embassy itself.

  He was taken to a third floor reception room, and offered tea and little cakes. He accepted them with a small bow, feeling out of his element. He knew that diplomacy required a detailed understanding of a particular country. He didn't even know if the Chinese had a tea ritual that he might be violating, the way the Japanese did.

  He'd been to most countries in the world, but somehow he had missed China.

  After a few moments alone with the guards, a door nearly hidden in flowery wallpaper opened. A short man wearing a military-cut jacket over dark blue trousers entered. He nodded at Richard, who stood.

  They shook hands. The man introduced himself as the ambassador, and Richard introduced himself as well, just to be polite.

  "Forgive my pre-emptive invitation,” the ambassador said. “It is just that I know your interest in the Apollo 8 astronauts."

  Richard smiled. “The whole world knows of my interest, Ambassador."

  "Yes.” The man bowed slightly. He folded his hands together. “It is my understanding that your interest supercedes your government's."

  "I wouldn't say that,” Richard said. “We lost a lot of good men and women going into space. We couldn't afford to rescue them all."

  "But these were the first lost in actual space travel, is that not correct? At least in America."

  Richard nodded.

  "I remember that time,” the ambassador said. “I was but a boy. My country rejoiced in the failure of yours, but I asked my father why we celebrated when brave men died. He had no answer."

  Richard set his tea cup down. The ambassador hadn't touched his tea or the cakes.