Out of Orbit (40 page)

After their helicopter touched down on the grass, its wash blowing dust up and into the wind, Foale and Duncan joined the posse of soldiers, technicians, and medical personnel who had made the short run across to the astronauts. After some good-natured ribbing—What took you so long?—there were hugs and broad smiles. For Expedition Six, even the gentlest embrace felt like a vise, but it was a good kind of squeeze. It was something to see other faces.

Back in Astana, flush with joy and relief, Gerstenmaier remembered the anxious crowds waiting for his word in Moscow. He fired
up his satellite phone and exalted in reporting a happy reunion: they have been found, and they have been seen, and they are very much alive.

His trembling voice was relayed through Houston and flung back toward two rooms in TsUP. In that magical instant, all of the time and all of the distance had finally disappeared, and the tension and anxiety and pain that had built up over five and a half terrible hours and however many miles was broken.

·   ·   ·

The American delegation exploded in relief, Gerstenmaier’s phone call having lit some kind of fuse. There were tears and hugs and handshakes and backslaps. Micki collapsed into Annie’s arms. O’Keefe let loose with a victory howl. Readdy smiled and shook his head. Pastorek exhaled and put down his pen.

The Russians had also heard the news—as well as the roaring of the Americans—and emerged, cheering, from their own storm cellars. Having been divided by language and walls and now being united by celebration, the two camps met somewhere in the middle, in a massive conference room, the only room at TsUP big enough to contain the elation. There were the universal expressions of ecstasy: smiles and laughter, more handshakes and hugs. And then, from nowhere, several bottles of clear, cold vodka were broken out.

Almost immediately, a series of Russian officials began tearing into long, elaborate speeches, each of which was punctuated with a toast, a cheer, and another shot of vodka. The Americans caught on to the routine fast enough, and soon the speeches grew shorter and the glasses more full. In no time at all, everybody in that loud, bursting room was some level of drunk.

There might have been something base-seeming about that, in capping something as spectacular as the return of three men from space with a mass downing of alcohol. But those bottles of vodka were more than simple pollution.

For the men of Expedition Six, there had been nobler outlets to vent the anxiety that had followed them down to the flats. They could find ecstasy in the green of the grass and inhale gallons of
crisp, clean air and watch white birds. In short, they could find in themselves a more poetic finish because their journey had come to such a beautiful end. They had known all along that they were safe.

But for the people who had been waiting so anxiously for their arrival, the day’s final exclamation point had seemed less sweet. All they had been able to do was wait and worry, enduring hours spent tugged through a knothole. And while their own journeys had been just as dramatic as Expedition Six’s, because they were static, because there had been no thump that signaled that they had made it back alive, they had felt robbed somehow. They were celebrating an abstraction. For them, each shot of vodka was the only reminder that all of their waiting and worrying was over. Each overturned glass and unmopped spill made out like gravity did for Expedition Six: each gave their patrons a heavy kind of comfort, the collective understanding that everything was going to be okay.

The toasting session’s buzz continued long after the Americans had left to board a couple of minivans destined for Star City, where Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit would arrive in four or five hours. For the people smiling out from inside the convoy, that drive through the suburbs of Moscow and into the trees went both fast and slow. As much as they wanted to see the objects of their affection with their own eyes, part of them also wanted the dreamlike anticipation to last, knowing that what had been so far away for so long was now so close.

·   ·   ·

When the space shuttle hits the runway, that’s it. It’s all over. There is the air, and there is the ground, and for the past twenty-five years, American astronauts have never had the chance to enjoy the space in between. But for the men who used to be Expedition Six, they basked in this more graceful transition. As if to remind them of what they once were and where they had once been, Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were soon back in the air. It’s one of the joys of returning by capsule—as it was with
Apollo
, so it is with
Soyuz
. Always, touchdown is followed by another liftoff, this time to a military installation in gloomy Astana, and then in the Aeroflot jet that
would take them to Star City. They were no longer spacemen, and that truth struck them hard, but they remained fliers. Through their windows, they could still look down on the Kazakh steppes, the way they had looked down on them through their windows back on station, thinking they were beautiful then and thinking they were beautiful now.

·   ·   ·

A few hundred people—although only a few that mattered most—were waiting for Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit when their plane finally touched down. The reception committee had filled the hours with more vodka and a little sleep, and Micki had also given herself time for a good long cry on her cottage step. It was the same cottage in which she had been singing with friends when the phone had rung so many months ago, calling her husband away. After she had cleaned herself up, she and Annie were packed onto a bus and given red roses and told to watch for their men through the windows.

The plane made a slow turn and taxied toward the crowd. There were cameramen and dignitaries and soldiers, the bunch of them getting damp in the mist that continued to fall out of a thin gray sky.

Whether it was for nostalgia’s sake or because of budget constraints, the Russians wheeled up one of those old-fashioned staircases. Perhaps it was because the setup made for such terrific pictures. Reporters and photographers stood poised for what seemed like forever, waiting for the plane’s engines to stop and the door to open. Finally, it was cracked like a hatch.

So, too, was the door of the bus, and Micki and Annie stepped out into the rain and the bright white of camera flashes. They strained their necks above the crowd to try to catch sight of their husbands, although Micki had already been told that she would likely need to come to Don rather than the other way around.

As commander, Bowersox had the honor of being the first out, smiling and raising his fists in the air. Boosted by a last-second charge of adrenaline, he ran down the stairs and launched himself
into the arms of the surging crowd. Sean O’Keefe had grabbed hold of Annie Bowersox’s hand, but now they nearly lost each other in the crush. It was like a rock concert after the lead singer takes a dive from the stage.

Budarin was next. He came down a little more slowly, a little more proudly, but waving and smiling, too.

After the commotion had died down, after the bottom of the stairs had been cleared, Micki made her way up. She ducked into the plane and saw Don, curled up in a corner under a blanket. He looked at her as though he had wanted to see no one else, and she put her hand to her mouth, not quite believing.

They had time only for a kiss. Pettit, having refused the offer of a stretcher or a chair, was helped out of the plane and down the stairs by two men. His jelly legs belied his good feeling.

The three men were wrestled through the throng and guided back to the bus, still idling in the near distance. O’Keefe pushed through the crowd, towing Annie Bowersox in his wake, and the two of them knocked together on the glass door. Bill Readdy had taken Micki Pettit by the arm, and they, too, made it through the celebration and into the relative sanctuary of the bus. Through the rain-streaked windows, they watched the crowd continue to cheer and applaud, but now, inside, there was only the hush of relief broken by short outbursts of joy. Best of all, there were long hugs between husbands and wives who had thought in their weaker moments that another touch might never come. They kissed and put their heads on each other’s shoulders, and they swayed with the lurching of the bus.

It was the sort of poignant scene that films usually close on, fading out on a New York City sidewalk or at the bow of a ship at sunset or in the arrivals terminal of a busy airport. Music swells up, and the camera pulls back, revealing two people locked in a tight embrace, perfectly still amidst the chaos that swirls around them, together, alone against the universe. That’s exactly what it looked like when that bus threaded its way through the crowd and made for open range. The only things missing were the names of the key
grips, best boys, and set designers projected against the wet windows.

But that’s not how these stories end in real life. The finish is never quite so neat. There are always footnotes.

·   ·   ·

Over the rumble of the diesel engine, Sean O’Keefe pulled out his cell phone and called up Washington, D.C., where Vice President Cheney had been waiting for word of his former employee’s success. (He even put Bowersox on the line to say hello.)

Nikolai Budarin looked forward to seeing his own wife, Marina, who was also waiting, but with an infusion of love, cigarettes, and vodka.

Waiting for them, too, was a gang of scrubbed-down flight surgeons cloistered inside the Prophy, the Russian postflight checkout building, a kind of one-stop hotel and hospital for returning spacemen. The doctors were poised to get their gloved hands on three exhausted men who had made the transition from astronauts to experiments and now, finally, to fresh specimens, ripe for dissection. The bus stopped at their open front doors. With the hiss of brakes, reunion was interrupted.

Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit were escorted inside. They were treated gently by the Russians, who have learned over the years how tender their subjects can be, but the three men were put under the microscope all the same. Like every astronaut and every cosmonaut, from the first to the last, they were seen as something alien and wonderful, these ordinary assemblies of skin and tissue that had been turned into artifacts by virtue of the places they had been. Spending nearly six months in space had made them worthy of a fine-eyed examination, and now they were looked upon if not as heroes, then at least as monuments.

However subtle the adulation was, it made Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit feel vaguely uncomfortable. They were still adjusting to gravity’s weight and the taste of earth’s air. The whiff of something as ordinary as muscle rub hit them like smelling salts. Ringing
phones sounded like fire alarms. A change in temperature of just a few degrees left them either shivering or burning up. And on top of all of that, now here they were, after having spent so much time alone, stuck in the center of a clutch of curious physicians, measuring their fat stores and shining lights into their eyes.

The most painful invasion was saved for last, nearly thirty-six hours after Expedition Six had blinked awake for their final morning in space. The surgeons took liberal biopsies of their calf muscles, leaving three divots in each of the men. The open sores were reminders for Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit that it would take months and perhaps even years for them to earn back the calluses that they had lost; their skin was still fresh and pink. In the meantime, they tried to separate themselves from the noise and commotion—they tried to look inside themselves for places to hide, to insulate themselves from their new surroundings. They were only partly successful. They felt as though they had been set upon, as though these bizarre masked crusaders had broken through their best defenses, intent on shaking them out of their comas.

And worse, they knew, too, that this was just the first of it.

They began steeling themselves for the chaos to come. By the time they emerged from the examination rooms, they had already grown harder. Already, they had begun patching the workaday glaze that had taken them so very long to shed.

They were placed in quarantine, as much for their benefit as for anybody else’s. First, though, Budarin had time to sneak out to see his wife and collect his smokes. O’Keefe and Annie sat down with Bowersox for a short, filmed chat about their extraordinary return to earth. (“Nikolai was like a cheerleader up there!” Bowersox said.) And Micki was given a few minutes to visit with Don, who had been laid out in bed. He was drifting in and out of sleep.

She made sure he was tucked in, his blanket pulled up, and she planted another gentle kiss on his forehead. She wished him good night. “Get some rest,” she whispered. She said she would try to see him in the morning if they would let her, and with that, she stepped out into the hallway.

Looking back through her husband’s door, she felt as though she had said good night to a man she had never seen before but also to a man who had never gone away.

·   ·   ·

While Bowersox, Budarin, and Pettit remained locked down, their friends and family drowned themselves in more vodka. There was a sweet spread waiting outside of the Star City cottages that had been reserved for them. Chairs and tables were scattered on the grass. There were baskets of bread and bowls of salad. Meat was crackling over coals and under skies that had just started to clear. Everybody filled their plates and grabbed a drink and sat down heavily into their seats or stood together in clusters, basking in one another’s glow. It was like a long-overdue family reunion, except that three of the most honored guests were absent, sixteen dawns and dusks a shift having given way to one. The sun set. And with it, the gathering outside the cottages broke up. Bleary and wrung out, the partygoers drifted off into the night, one by one, two by two.

Sean O’Keefe, Bill Readdy, Paul Pastorek, and a few other NASA officials weren’t quite ready for sleep, however. They were still coming down from a long day, swings of jet lag and adrenaline that had made like a speedball. They voted to retreat to the basement of one of the cottages, to a small room that had been dubbed Shep’s Bar.