by Ben Bova
The elevator opened onto a cramped enclosure teeming with technicians in the inevitable white coveralls. A featureless tube of smooth gray walls led out of the enclosure, ending at the hatch of the Soyuz spacecraft.
Stoner turned toward his friend. “This is as far as you go, Kirill. Launch crew only from here on.”
Markov saw that the cosmonaut, Major Federenko, was already partway down the access tube, waiting, his pressure suit zipped up and his fishbowl helmet under his arm.
“It’s okay,” Stoner said. “Federenko speaks English pretty well. I won’t get lost.”
Markov forced a smile. “Good luck, Keith. Vaya con Dios.”
Stoner grinned at him. “Et cum spirito tuo, old friend. I’ll see you when I get back.”
Markov stood there feeling empty and terribly sad as Stoner clumped down the tube toward the cosmonaut.
“Hello, Nikolai,” he heard Stoner say. “Looks like a good day for flying.”
“Yes, yes,” Federenko replied in a deep bass voice that echoed off the tube walls. “Good day. Very good day.”
Like two young knights sallying out for adventure, Markov thought. Then he realized why he was so sad. And leaving me behind.
He went back down the elevator and was driven in the minibus back to the launch control building. Maria was waiting for him as he stepped down from the bus. She wore her drab brown uniform now.
“I wish them well,” she said.
Markov nodded and put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. Incredibly, she let him get away with it.
“They have the future of the world in their hands, Marushka,” he said to her. “Our future, the future of Russia, of America—the whole world.”
Maria looked up at him. “They’ll be all right,” she assured him. “The launch will go well. Come, we can watch it from inside the control center.”
As the sun crept over the distant hills and the morning mists of Rome began to burn away, the Pope got up from his knees and walked slowly to the door of his private chapel.
Cardinal Benedetto would be out there, he knew. And Von Friederich and so many others. The television people. The paparazzi. He had to simplify it all, bring it down to a few strong words that all could understand. He spoke not merely to the cameras and the newspapers, but to hundreds of millions of believers and—strangely enough—to billions of non-believers, as well. The Papacy was a heavy burden, global in scope. Now it was about to become interstellar.
That is what I will tell them, the Pope thought, nodding slowly to himself. God in His mercy and wisdom has seen fit to reveal more of His creation to us. We are indeed fortunate to live in these times. This alien object reaffirms Christ’s truth, that all men are brothers.
Fleetingly, he wondered again what the consequences would be if the alien turned out to be evil, devilish.
It cannot be, he told himself firmly. That is something I cannot believe. God would not allow such an evil to fall upon us.
He reached out boldly and threw open the doors. Television lights glared around him and the crowd of news reporters strained against the velvet ropes that had been set up.
The dazzling lights even reached back into the chapel chamber, where, above the altar at which he had prayed, a Medieval mural of the Flood showed a sinful mankind being chastized by a wrathful God.
Halfway around the world, on Kwajalein, it was early evening. Reynaud sat by Schmidt’s bedside and watched the countdown’s progress on the hospital television set.
Cronkite was showing a view of Cape Canaveral. A NASA Space Shuttle stood gleaming white in the glare of floodlights, its nose pointing into the Florida sky.
“And at Kennedy Space Center, American technicians are preparing to launch the tanker that will refuel the Russian Soyuz, deep in space, as it nears the alien craft.
“The tanker itself is a Russian vehicle, flown to the United States six days ago as part of this intricate joint American-Soviet effort to make contact with the alien spacecraft.”
Schmidt, sitting up in his bed, asked through his wired jaw, “Do you think they’ll make it?” His voice was thick and slow.
“I believe they will,” Reynaud answered. “Stoner won’t let anything stop him.”
* * *
The General Secretary also sat propped up in bed, watching the final moments of the countdown on his private television set. Borodinski sat next to the big, heavily blanketed bed.
“It is going well, Comrade Secretary,” the younger man said without taking his eyes off the screen. “You must be very proud this morning. The whole world is watching Russia lead the way to a meeting with the alien.”
But the General Secretary had closed his eyes. His chin slumped to his chest. His final breath was a long, soft sigh of release.
Stoner lay on his back in the cramped spherical capsule of the Soyuz spacecraft. Helmet on, visor locked and sealed, gloved hands resting on his knees. And sweating. His legs dangled up above him. Like a turtle on its back, he thought. Useless and in danger.
He turned his head to see Federenko, in the left seat, but the helmet blocked his view. He could hear the cosmonaut, though, in his earphones, chatting happily with the launch control engineers in Russian. Stoner guessed at what they were saying.
“Internal power on.” A row of lights on the panel a few inches over his head winked on, green.
“Life support systems, on.”
“Guidance computer, on.”
“Air pressure, normal.
The cosmonaut’s gloved fingers flicked across the switches of his control panel like a pianist testing a new instrument. One by one, the banks of lights lit up.
“Shtoner,” Federenko’s bass rumbled.
“Yes?”
“You can pick up the countdown at Teh minus one meenute, at my mark…Mark.”
T minus one minute. Stoner heard the Russian words in his earphones. He appreciated Federenko’s taking the moment out to give him a translation. Now his own mental clock could click off the last sixty seconds in cadence with the Russian launch controller’s voice.
Stoner’s eyes flicked over the control panel. Every light and switch had been hastily labeled in English. He had crammed a year’s worth of orientation into a few weeks. But I can fly this bird if I have to, he told himself. They can maneuver it remotely from the ground, of course, but I can override them if I have to. I can fly her.
His hands were slippery with sweat inside the silvered gloves. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take over control of the spacecraft.
T minus thirty seconds.
Jo stood on the roof of their barracks building, peering into the brightening sky and the rocket booster, several kilometers away.
Don’t let anything go wrong, she prayed silently. Don’t let anything go wrong.
The loudspeaker boomed in Russian for several moments, then in English:
“A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET UNION. GOOD FORTUNE TO THE TWO BRAVE MEN WHO GO TO MEET THE ALIEN SPACESHIP THE HEARTIEST ADMIRATION AND GOOD WISHES OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE FLY WITH YOU ON YOUR GALLANT MISSION.”
Before the echoes could die away, the voice added:
“T MINUS FIFTEEN SECONDS.”
T minus ten seconds, Stoner counted mentally.
He could feel his heart pounding wildly as he went on, Five, four, three…
The booster trembled beneath them. Pumps starting up.
“…one, zero…”
He heard the Russian word for Ignition! and felt the whole capsule shudder. A dull growl from somewhere deep within, exploding into an ear-shattering bellow as millions of demons howled their loudest and a heavy, implacable hand squeezed down on his chest, pressed him into his seat, shook him with bone-jarring violence.
Stoner felt the breath forced out of him. His eyeballs were pressing back in their sockets. The noise was overpowering, a solid wall that pressed his eardrums flat. He couldn’t lift his hands from the armrests. His spine was being crushed. And the noise, the noise and vibr
ation rattling him…
* * *
Across the whole world hundreds of millions watched the gleaming rocket climb upward on its tongue of flame, straight and stately as if guided along an invisible taut wire, rising slowly, majestically, then accelerating, higher, faster, into the cloud-flecked blue, faster now, arcing over, flame bellowing from its rocket nozzles, racing across the sky, dwindling from view.
In Moscow a huge roomful of hardened correspondents broke into cheers as the booster hurtled across the sky.
In New York, Walter Cronkite stood up at his desk, startling the cameramen, who abruptly jerked their cameras upward to keep him in frame. Millions of viewers thought they heard Cronkite mutter, “Go, baby, go.”
Jo watched the rocket lift off, its exhaust flame brighter than anything she’d ever seen before. The booster rose in eerie silence, up and up, higher and higher, without a sound to be heard. Then the overwhelming roar reached her, washed over her rooftop perch, wave after wave of solid white noise, making the whole building shake. Jo imagined she could feel the heat from the rocket engines, knew it was all in her mind, but felt it anyway.
Good-by, Keith, she said to herself. Somehow she felt, deep within her, that she would never see him again.
* * *
Man will not always stay on Earth…. Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
KONSTANTIN EDUARDOVICH TSIOLKOVSKY
(1857–1935)
* * *
CHAPTER 41
The mind-numbing roar eased away and finally died altogether. The pressure dwindled until Stoner saw that his arms were floating free of the seat rests. He felt light-headed, and for a moment his innards told him that he was falling. Squeezing his eyes shut hard enough to make them tear, he opened them and he was no longer lying on his back but sitting upright in the Soyuz capsule. Nothing had changed but his perspective.
“Shtoner,” Federenko’s deep voice rumbled in his earphones. “You okay?”
He nodded. “Okay, Nikolai. I’m fine. You?”
“All good.”
Stoner’s vision was blurred. “Okay to open my helmet?”
But Federenko was on the radio, checking back with mission control. Stoner waited until he was finished, then asked again.
“Yes, yes. Cabin pressure is normal. All systems are good, ground control confirms.”
Stoner slid the visor up, pulled his gloves off and wiped at his eyes. The gloves drifted out toward the control panel and he grabbed at them, grinning to himself.
“Zero gravity,” Federenko said. “You remember? Do not make crumbs when you eat.”
Stoner laughed and took a deep, easy breath. For the first time in nearly two years he was weightless. The pleasure of it was euphoric.
“Was a good launch, no?”
“Perfect,” Stoner said.
“Now we make contact with Salyut by radio, then go EVA to dock with equipment and supply vessels.”
Stoner pulled out the clipboard that was mounted on the panel to his right. In both Russian and English it listed every task they must do, the day and hour it must be started, and how long they had to complete each.
“You make the first EVA,” Stoner said.
“Da.”
“I’ll watch the store.”
Federenko peered from around the edge of his helmet. “Watch store?”
“It’s an American expression.” Stoner tried to explain it to him.
Federenko listened, frowning deeply. “But there is no one here to steal from store.”
Shrugging inside his bulky pressure suit, Stoner said, “Well, Nikolai, you know how it is in a capitalist society. So many thieves that we expect them everywhere.”
It made no impact on the cosmonaut. “But no thieves in orbit. No thieves aboard Salyut. They are both good Soviet citizens; officers in Red Army.”
Stoner grinned weakly and gave it up.
Borodinski was on the special picturephone that the General Secretary had set up in his quarters. The beefy-faced man in the viewing screen wore the collar of a soldier with the tab insignia of a major general.
“This line is scrambled and secure?” Borodinski asked in a near whisper.
“Yes, comrade. Of course.”
“I have heavy news that must not go beyond your ears until I call you again.”
“I have kept state secrets before, comrade,” the general said, a slight smirk twitching at the corners of his mouth.
“Our great friend is dead.”
“No!”
“Just a few minutes ago. The doctors have confirmed it. There is no hope of resuscitation.”
The general’s face fell. He seemed genuinely grieved. “He was a good man. A fine man. A strong comrade.”
“You understand why this news must be kept secret for the next several hours?”
“Of course, comrade. You have many calls to make, many…details to check on.”
“I have called you first,” Borodinski said, “because I want to impress on you the fact that the General Secretary’s policies are still in effect, still to be carried out exactly as he desired them to be.”
“Yes, comrade. Will the Presidium…?”
“That’s none of your concern at the moment. Of utmost importance is the question of the missiles. Are they ready to be fired if we should need them?”
“The strategic strike force is always prepared, comrade.”
“I mean,” Borodinski explained patiently, “the missiles that are being held ready for the alien spaceship.” Is the man being deliberately doltish? he wondered.
“Oh! Them! Yes, comrade, they are prepared for launching at an instant’s notice. The tracking radars have precise data on the alien’s position. The warheads are armed and ready.”
Borodinski nodded. “Very well. Keep the missiles in readiness. And yourself as well. I will call you, personally, if we should need them.”
“I understand, comrade. They will be ready, and so will I.”
As Borodinski clicked off the connection and the general’s face faded from the screen, he looked across the bedroom at the body of the General Secretary, arranged carefully on the bed, eyes closed, hands clasped on his chest.
“So much to do,” he muttered to himself. Now the real work begins, he knew. And the real danger. It was one thing to be handed the reins of power; it was quite another thing to hold onto them.
Borodinski shook his head. For a fleeting moment he almost envied the peaceful slumber of the General Secretary.
Stoner turned in his seat as Federenko opened the hatch that led from the orbital module and crawled back into the command section. The cosmonaut wormed his way into his own seat and gave a weary sigh of relief.
“It took longer than the schedule calls for, did it not?” He was breathing heavily, and his zippered coveralls were dark with perspiration.
Stoner glanced at the clipboard floating by his knee. “Eighteen minutes longer. Not bad. We still have plenty of slack in the schedule.”
Federenko passed a hand over his eyes. “It is so different out there…hard work.”
“I know.”
Outside the viewing port above his seat, Stoner could just make out the stubby outline of the Salyut space station. The two cosmonauts who had been living and working in the Salyut for the previous month had taken over the task of connecting the supply modules to their Soyuz.
My turn next, Stoner knew. Working in zero gravity sounded effortless, but he knew how easy it was to exhaust yourself. Every motion made in weightlessness had to be consciously, deliberately counteracted by a counter-motion. No friction to bring motions to a “natural” halt. No subliminal visual clues of distance or orientation. No up or down.
Years earlier, General Leonov, the first man to “walk” in space, had advised his cosmonauts, “Think ten times before moving a finger, and twenty times before moving a hand,” when working in space.
Still, Stoner felt eager as a puppy. Impatiently he
waited and watched the two Salyut cosmonauts at work, while Federenko went back into the orbital module of their spacecraft for a squeeze bulb of hot tea and enough room to stretch his aching limbs. Stoner sat alone in the cramped command module, surrounded by the Soyuz’s instruments, his eyes on the crewmen working outside.
Finally the digital clock on the control panel showed it was time for him to suit up. A radio command from ground control confirmed the time.
Federenko came back into the command module and took the pilot’s seat as Stoner unstrapped and wormed his way weightlessly into the orbital module.
The orbital module was a globular, womb-shaped section that served as a workroom, bunkhouse and air lock. Stoner slowly pulled on his pressure suit, carefully testing each zipper and seal, forcing himself to be deliberate and patient. The module was a clutter of bunks, lockers, cabinets and two airtight hatches: one that connected with the command module, the other that opened onto vacuum.
Federenko came in to help him into the backpack of oxygen tanks and maneuvering jets. Finally Stoner lowered the fishbowl helmet over his head, sealed it to the metal collar of his suit. Federenko connected the hoses from the oxygen tanks to his helmet. Together they tested the suit’s radio, oxygen pressure, heater. Stoner flexed all the joints, then nodded to Federenko and slid the visor down over his face. The cosmonaut ducked back through the hatch into the command module, and closed the massive airtight hatch behind him.
Stoner was alone now in the metal womb. Reaching out with his gloved hand, he opened the safety latch and then pressed the button that started the air pumps. Through his helmet he heard the machinery stir to life, sucking the air out of the orbital module, into storage tanks.
The telltale panel light went from green to amber, and finally to red. Stoner slowly opened the outer hatch, then drifted out of the metal womb head first.
And gasped.
He had remembered all those months on the ground how beautiful it was in space, but the memory was a mental image, not the visceral passion. Now he saw it again, felt it in his guts again, and all the breath gushed out of him.