by Ben Bova
“Workman’s insurance cover that?”
The super didn’t answer for a moment. Then, “We’ll take up a collection for you, Harry. I’ll raise whatever it takes.”
“No,” Harry said. “No charity.”
“It’s not charity, it’s—”
“Besides, a guy doesn’t need his legs up here. I can get around just as well without it.”
“You can’t stay here!”
“Why not?” Harry said. “I can still work. I don’t need the leg.”
“Company rules,” the super mumbled.
Harry was about to say, “Fuck the company rules.” Instead, he heard himself say, “Change ’em.”
The super stared at him.
Hours after the supervisor left, a young doctor in a white jacket came into Harry’s cubicle.
“We did a routine tox screen on your blood sample,” he said.
Harry said nothing. He knew what was coming.
“You had some pretty fancy stuff in you,” said the doctor, smiling.
“Guess so.”
The doctor pursed his lips, as if he were trying to come to a decision. At last he said, “Your blood work report is going to get lost, Harry. We’ll detox you here before we release you. All off the record.”
That’s when it hit Harry.
“You’re Liza’s friend.”
“I’m not doing this for Liza. I’m doing it for you. You’re a hero, Harry. You saved a life.”
“Then I can stay?” Harry asked hopefully.
“Nobody’s going to throw you out because of drugs,” said the doctor. “And if you can prove you can still work, even with only one leg, I’ll recommend you be allowed to stay.”
And the legend began. One-legged Harry Twelvetoes. He never returned to Earth. When the habitat was finished, he joined a new crew that worked on the next habitat. And he started working on a dream, as well. As the years turned into decades, and the legend of Harry Twelvetoes spread all across the orbital construction sites, even out to the cities that were being built on the moon, Harry worked on his dream until it started to come true.
He lived long enough to see the start of construction for a habitat for his own people, a man-made world where his tribe could live in their own way, in their own desert environment, safe from encroachment, free to live as they chose to live.
He buried his great-uncle there, and the tribal elders named the habitat after him: Cloud Eagle.
Harry never quite figured out what the monster was that he was supposed to slay. But he knew he had somehow found his path, and he lived a long life in harmony with the great world around him. When his great-grandchildren laid him to rest beside Cloud Eagle, he was at peace.
And his legend lived long after him.
Introduction to
“Muzhestvo”
Jamie Waterman is the central character (hero?) of my three novels about Mars: Mars (published 1992), Return to Mars (1999), and Mars Life (2008).
Jamie is half Navajo, half Yankee. As the novels evolved while I wrote them, the two worlds of Earth and Mars came to represent the two sides of Jamie’s character: the blue world, Earth, and the red world of Mars.
The Anglo and the Navajo.
“Muzhestvo” takes place early in Jamie’s career, before he’s even selected to make the first mission to Mars. It’s a tale about courage and comradeship, about the strange inner workings of the people who want to extend humankind’s horizons—and their own.
MUZHESTVO
As they drove along the river, Yuri Zavgorodny gestured with his free hand.
“Like your New Mexico, no?” he asked in his hesitant English.
Jamie Waterman unconsciously rubbed his side. They had taken the stitches out only yesterday, and the incision still felt sore.
“New Mexico,” Zavgorodny repeated. “Like this? Yes?”
Jamie almost answered, “No.” But the mission administrators had warned them all to be as diplomatic as possible with the Russians—and everyone else.
“Sort of,” Jamie murmured.
“Yes?” asked Zavgorodny over the rush of the searing wind blowing through the car windows.
“Yes,” said Jamie.
The flat, brown countryside stretching out beyond the river looked nothing like New Mexico. The sky was a washed-out pale blue, the desert bleak and empty in every direction. This is an old, tired land, Jamie said to himself as he squinted against the baking hot wind. Used up. Dried out. Nothing like the vivid mountains and bold skies of his home. New Mexico was a new land, raw and magic and mystical. This dull, dusty desert out here is ancient; it’s been worn flat by too many armies marching across it.
“Like Mars,” said one of the other Russians. His voice was a deep rumble, where Zavgorodny’s was reedy, like a snake-charmer’s flute. Jamie had been quickly introduced to all four of them but the only name that stuck was Zavgorodny’s.
Christ, I hope Mars isn’t this dull, Jamie said to himself.
Yesterday Jamie had been at Bethesda Naval Hospital, having the stitches from his appendectomy removed. All the Mars mission trainees had their appendixes taken out. Mission regulations. No sense risking an attack of appendicitis twenty million miles from the nearest hospital. Even though the decisions about who would actually go to Mars had not been made yet, everyone lost their appendix.
“Where are we going?” Jamie asked. “Where are you taking me?”
It was Sunday, supposedly a day of rest even for the men and women who were training to fly to Mars. Especially for a new arrival, jet-lagged and bearing a fresh scar on his belly. But at sunrise the four cosmonauts had roused Jamie from his bed at the hotel and insisted that he come with them.
“Airport,” said the deep-voiced cosmonaut on Jamie’s left. He was jammed into the back seat, sandwiched between two of the Russians, sweaty body odor pungent despite the sharp scent of strong soap. Two more rode up front, Zavgorodny at the wheel.
Like a gang of Mafia hit men taking me for a ride, Jamie thought. The Russians smiled at one another a lot, grinning as they talked among themselves and hiking their eyebrows significantly. Something was up. And they were not going to tell the American geologist about it until they were damned good and ready.
They were solidly built men, all four of them. Short and thickset. Like Jamie himself, although the Russians were much lighter in complexion than Jamie’s half-Navajo skin.
“Is this official business?” he had asked them when they pounded on his hotel door at the crack of dawn.
“No business,” Zavgorodny had replied while the other three grinned broadly. “Pleasure. Fun.”
Fun for them, maybe, Jamie grumbled to himself as the car hummed along the concrete of the empty highway. The river curved off to their left. The wind carried the smell of sun-baked dust. The old town of Tyuratam and Leninsk, the new city built for the space engineers and cosmonauts, was miles behind them now.
“Why are we going to an airport?” Jamie asked.
The one on his right side laughed aloud. “For fun. You will see.”
“Yes,” said the one on his left. “For much fun.”
Jamie had been a Mars trainee for little more than six months. This was his first trip to Russia—to Kazakhstan, really—although his schedule had already whisked him to Australia, Alaska, French Guiana, and Spain. There had been endless physical examinations, tests of his reflexes, his strength, his eyesight, his judgment. They had probed his teeth and pronounced them in excellent shape, then sliced his appendix out of him.
And now a quartet of cosmonauts he’d never met before was taking him in the early morning hours of a quiet Sunday for a drive to Outer Nowhere, Kazakhstan.
For much fun.
There had been precious little fun in the training for Mars. A lot of competition among the scientists, since only sixteen
would eventually make the flight: sixteen out of more than two hundred trainees. Jamie realized that the competition must be equally fierce among the cosmonauts and astronauts.
“Have you all had your appendixes removed?” he asked.
The grins faded. The cosmonaut beside him answered, “No. Is not necessary. We do not go to Mars.”
“You’re not going?”
“We are instructors,” Zavgorodny said over his shoulder. “We have already been turned down for the flight mission.”
Jamie wanted to ask why, but he thought better of it. This was not a pleasant topic of conversation.
“Your appendix?” asked the man on his left. He ran a finger across his throat.
Jamie nodded. “They took the stitches out yesterday.” He realized it had actually been Friday in Bethesda and now it was Sunday, but it felt like yesterday.
“You are an American Indian?”
“Half Navajo.”
“The other half?”
“Anglo,” said Jamie. He saw that the word meant nothing to the Russians. “White. English.”
The man sitting up front beside Zavgorodny turned to face him. “When they took out your appendix—you had a medicine man with painted face to rattle gourds over you?”
All four of the Russians burst into uproarious laughter. The car swerved on the empty highway, Zavgorodny laughed so hard.
Jamie made himself grin back at them. “No, I had anesthesia, just as you would.”
The Russians chattered among themselves. Jamie got a vision of jokes about Indians, maybe about a red man wanting to go to the red planet. There was no nastiness in it, he felt, just four beer-drinking fliers having some fun with a new acquaintance.
Wish I understood Russian, he said to himself. Wish I knew what these four clowns are up to. Much fun.
Then he remembered that none of these men could even hope to get to Mars anymore. They had been relegated to the role of instructors. He thought to himself, I’ve still got a chance to make the mission. Do they hold that against me? Just what in the hell are they planning to do?
Zavgorodny swung the car off the main highway and down a two-lane dirt road that paralleled a tall wire fence. Jamie could see, far in the distance, hangars and planes parked haphazardly. So we really are going to an airport, he realized.
They drove through an unguarded gate and out to a far corner of the sprawling, silent airport where a single small hangar stood all by itself, like an outcast or an afterthought. A high-wing, twin-engine plane sat on squat tricycle landing gear on the concrete apron in front of the hangar. To Jamie it looked like a Russian version of a Twin Otter, a plane he had flown in during his week’s stint in Alaska’s frigid Brooks Range.
“You like to fly?” Zavgorodny asked as they piled out of the car.
Jamie stretched his arms and back, glad to be no longer squeezed into the car’s back seat. It was not even nine o’clock yet, but the sunshine felt hot and good as it baked into his shoulders.
“I enjoy flying,” he said. “I don’t have a pilot’s license, though. I’m not qualified—”
Zavgorodny laughed. “Good thing! We are four pilots. That is three too many.”
The four cosmonauts were already wearing one-piece flight suits of faded, well-worn tan. Jamie had pulled on a white short-sleeved knit shirt and a pair of denims when they had roused him from his hotel bed. He followed the others into the sudden, cool darkness of the hangar. It smelled of machine oil and gasoline. Two of the cosmonauts went clattering up a flight of metal stairs to an office perched on the catwalk above.
Zavgorodny beckoned Jamie to a long table where a row of parachute packs sat big and lumpy, with straps spread out like the limp arms of octopi.
“We must all wear parachutes,” Zavgorodny said. “Regulations.”
“To fly in that?” Jamie jabbed a thumb toward the plane.
“Yes. Military plane. Regulations. Must wear chutes.”
Zavgorodny picked up one of the cumbersome chute packs and handed it to Jamie like a laborer passing a sack of cement.
“Where are we flying to?” Jamie asked.
“A surprise,” the Russian said. “You will see.”
“Much fun,” said the other cosmonaut, already buckling the groin straps of his chute.
Much fun for who? Jamie asked silently. But he worked his arms through the shoulder straps of the chute and leaned over to click the groin straps together and pull them tight.
The other two came down the metal steps, boots echoing in the nearly empty hangar. Jamie followed the quartet of cosmonauts out into the baking sunshine toward the plane. A wide metal hatch had been cut into its side. There were no stairs. When he hiked his foot up to the rim of the hatch, Jamie’s side twinged with pain. He grabbed the sides of the hatch and pulled himself inside the plane. Without help. Without wincing.
It was like an oven inside. Two rows of bucket seats, bare, unpadded. The two men who had been sitting in the back of the car with Jamie pushed past him and went into the cockpit. The pilot’s and copilot’s chairs were thick with padding; they looked comfortable.
Zavgorodny gestured Jamie to the seat directly behind the pilot. He sat himself in the opposite seat and pulled the safety harness across his shoulders and thighs. Jamie did the same, making certain the straps were tight. The parachute pack served as a sort of cushion, but it felt awkward to Jamie: like underwear that had gotten twisted.
One by one, the engines coughed, sputtered, then blasted into life. The plane shook like a palsied old man. As the propellers whirred to invisible blurs, Jamie heard all sorts of rattling noises, as if the plane was going to fall apart at any moment. Something creaked, something moaned horribly. The plane rolled forward.
The two pilots had clamped headphones over their heads, but if they were in contact with the control tower, Jamie could not hear a word they spoke over the roar of the engines and the wind blowing fine, sandpapery dust through the cabin. The fourth cosmonaut was sitting behind Jamie. No one had shut the hatch. Twisting around in his seat, Jamie saw that there was no door for the hatch: they were going to fly with it wide open.
The gritty wind roared through as the plane gathered speed down the runway, skidding slightly first one way and then the other.
Awfully long run for a plane this size, Jamie thought. He glanced across at Zavgorodny. The Russian grinned at him.
And then they were off the ground. The sandblasting ended; the wind was clean now. Jamie saw the airport dwindling away out his window, the parked planes and buildings shrinking into toys. The land spread out, brown and dead-dry beneath the cloudless pale-blue sky. The engines settled into a rumbling growl; the wind howled so loudly that Jamie had to lean across the aisle and shout into Zavgorodny’s ear:
“So where are we going?”
Zavgorodny shouted back, “To find Muzhestvo.”
“Moo . . . what?”
“Muzhestvo!” the cosmonaut yelled louder.
“Where is it? How far away?”
The Russian laughed. “You will see.”
They climbed steadily for what seemed like an hour. Can’t be more than ten thousand feet, Jamie said to himself. It was difficult to judge vertical distances, but they would have to go on oxygen if they flew much beyond ten thousand feet, he thought. It was getting cold. Jamie wished he had brought his windbreaker. They should have told me, he complained silently. They should have warned me.
The copilot looked back over his shoulder, staring directly at Jamie. He grinned, then put a hand over his mouth and hollered, “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” His version of an Indian war whoop. Jamie kept his face expressionless.
Suddenly, the plane dipped and skidded leftward. Jamie was slammed against the curving skin of the fuselage and almost banged his head against the window. He stared out at the brown landscape beneath him, wrinkled with hills and a
single sparkling lake far below, as the plane seemed to hang on its left wingtip and slowly, slowly revolve.
Then it dove and pulled upward, squeezing Jamie down into his seat. The plane climbed awkwardly, waddling in the air, then flipped over onto its back. Jamie felt all weight leave him; he was hanging by his seat harness but weighed practically nothing. It dived again, and weight returned, heavy, crushing, as the plane hurtled toward those brown bare hills, engines screaming, wind whistling through the shaking, rattling cabin.
And then it leveled off, engines purring, everything as normal as a commuter flight.
Zavgorodny was staring at Jamie. The copilot glanced back over his shoulder. And Jamie understood. They were ragging him. He was the new kid on the block, and they were seeing if they could scare him. Their own little version of the Vomit Comet, Jamie said to himself. See if they can make me turn green or get me to puke. Much fun.
Every tribe has its initiation rites, he realized. He had never been properly initiated as a Navajo; his parents had been too Anglicized to allow it. But it seemed these guys were going to make up for that.
Jamie made himself grin at Zavgorodny. “That was fun,” he yelled, hoping that the other three could hear him over the engines and the wind. “I didn’t know you could loop an old crate like this.”
Zavgorodny bobbed his head up and down. “Not recommended. Maybe the wings come off.”
Jamie shrugged inside his seat harness. “What’s next?”
“Muzhestvo.”
They flew peacefully for another quarter-hour or so, no aerobatics, no conversation. Jamie realized they had made one wide, circling turn and were starting another. He looked out the window. The ground below was flat and empty, as desolate as Mars except for a single narrow road running straight across the brown, barren wasteland.
Zavgorodny unbuckled his safety harness and stood up. He had to crouch slightly because the of the cabin’s low overhead as he stepped out into the aisle and back toward the big, wide, still-open hatch.
Jamie turned in his seat and saw that the other cosmonaut was on his feet, too, and standing at the hatch.