Russian Spring (94 page)

But we optimists look out at the stars and hopefully see a galactic main and the ships of many peoples sailing its immensity, and we say perhaps they have avoided contacting us for the best of reasons. Perhaps they’ve just been waiting for us to grow up, put the strife and dangers of planetary adolescence behind us, hoist our own sails, and set forth to join them, not as the buccaneers we once were, but as a mature and worthy civilization.

—
Science

Occasionally, Jerry found himself rising up to the surface of a sea of warm liquid blackness into a world of pressure and pain and sparky occluded vision. Sometimes Franja was there, sometimes the doctor, but most of these moments of conscious lucidity were endured alone, lying in the darkened cabin, feeling the breath being squeezed out of him, the edge of vertigo and nausea, the pains radiating out from his chest down his limbs, the headache that fragmented thought, the fetid metallic taste of his own death in his mouth.

A part of him would recoil and try to drift back into the comforting nothingness, but the stronger part of him fought to retain consciousness even of this, fought to remain awake and alive, fought not to die like a whimpering creature in the dark, used the pain, the struggle itself, as a goad to awareness.

Not yet! Not now!

Always the darkness was stronger, always his last thought was of being dragged back down beneath the surface, but always he came rising up again, and now he felt himself surfacing once more, into the pain, into the ceaseless pressure, into . . .

He blinked his eyes in wonder. There were still floaters in his field of vision, but he was seeing much more clearly now. And thinking more clearly too, he found himself realizing. He was fully awake. There were still tingly pains in his chest and limbs, but the pressure was gone. And so was the crushing weight of gravity.

His head still ached and he was still quite dizzy, but the black tide had receded from his mind, and his consciousness was clear and sharp. Gasping to breathe the attenuated air, he felt like a dying fish that had been tossed back into the water, reprieved and reinvigorated by a sudden return to his natural element.

As zero gravity was now.

And then he realized what had happened. The main engine had been shut down for the insertion into lunar orbit. He had made it! They were there! They had reached the Moon!

But then he remembered that there was one ordeal yet to come.

They would use gravitational braking to let the Moon close the parabola of their flyby into an elliptical orbit, but they had to lose velocity first to do it, and that meant one more burn, a short, hard hot one at a quarter g, with the main engine thrusting against the forward vector.

First they would turn the ship. . . .

And the
GTN
began to jerk and judder as scores of little control thrusters brought it about. Then there was a long terrifying stillness as the computers verified the burn parameters.

And the ship shook and a great fist slammed him back into the padding, knocking the breath out of him, sending lightning bolts of pain across his chest and down his limbs, pounding him back into the inky waters, pushing him under, dragging him away, down, down, down . . .

Not yet, goddamn you! Not now!

Jerry ground his fingernails into the flesh of his palms. He bit down gingerly on his tongue. He would not let the darkness carry him away this time, he would not trust that he would rise to the surface again, he would damn well wait this out, he would not lose consciousness now!

Not yet, motherfucker! Not now!

It seemed to go on forever, and then, all at once, it was over. The main engine shut down, the fist on his chest disappeared, and he came bobbing weightless like a cork up out of the depths of the suffocating sea.

After the acceleration, the return of zero gravity was like a burst of exhilarating energy, a return to natural life. His breathing was labored, the pains in his chest and arms were worse than before, there was an unsettling numbness in his fingers and toes, but his vision had cleared, the darkness had receded, and he was very much awake and aware.

Indeed, everything seemed to have a special sharpness, a newness, a wonderful clarity. Slowly and awkwardly, he managed to disengage himself from the nets, and let himself float upward like a cloud toward
the arbitrary ceiling. He just let himself drift like that for a while, exulting in the weightless freedom, until a ring came within his feeble grasp.

He was hanging there from it in a standing position when they came to get him, floating on his feet like a man, like a new man, like a man of the future who was going to the Moon.

Franja’s eyes widened in amazement. The doctor frowned. The cameraman caught it for posterity.

“Well, well, Mr. Reed,” the man from Tass said in English, with a smile of relief, “good to see you up and about.”

Jerry insisted on making his own way to the bridge, hand over hand out of the cabin and down the central corridor, with Franja lugging the hibernautika behind him, and the cameraman brachiating awkwardly backward in front of him to get the shot. It seemed to require no strength at all, once you got into the rhythm of it and just let it happen in liquid slow motion, it was like some kind of effortless aerial dance.

You’re a real space cadet
, Bob had told him often enough.
You ought to be a citizen of outer space.

He grinned as he brachiated down the corridor, weak as a kitten, still in pain, intimate now with his own approaching death, but flying weightlessly like a bird through its natural element just the same.

Now I am, Bob, now I am!

Franja said good-bye at the entrance to the bridge. There were only three free positions inside, and this was a moment that the press pool, robbed of so much human-interest coverage by Jerry’s weakened condition, refused to cede to familial togetherness.

She handed the hibernautika over to the Tass reporter, whom the luck of the pool schedule had given this slot, and the bridge door opened. The cameraman backed awkwardly inside, and then the correspondent, beckoning for Jerry to follow.

Jerry grabbed the last ring in the corridor and vaulted feet first inside. The Russian co-pilot was there to catch him, hugging him about the waist, like a man tenderly catching a small child in his arms.

Through the observation bubble, the Moon was enormous, and the Grand Tour Navette was falling toward it as it approached the line of the terminator, descending toward the pearlescent gray surface just as the Eagle had in those televised images an entire lifetime ago.

But there it was, no longer an image on television, no longer a childhood dream, no longer a flat white circle but a great gleaming curve of a planet rising up to greet him.

The co-pilot released him, took him by the hand, and towed him gently to his own empty couch at the front of the bridge.

“We thought you might like to log a little flight time on the controls,”
the young Russian said tenderly. He grinned at Jerry. “Our way of saying thanks for the joystick,” he said as he fastened the harness. “Thanks for giving us the fun of flying her by the seat of our pants!”

“Hold the joystick please, Mr. Reed,” the Tass reporter said. “What a wonderful shot!”

The Grand Tour Navette sped across the sunlit surface toward the line of the terminator, toward the dark side of the Moon, with the joystick control in Jerry’s right hand, and his ship approaching lunar perigee.

The
GTN
crossed the terminator and swung around the darkened hemisphere into brilliant starry darkness, up and around toward the apogee of its elliptical orbit, and there it was, rising from behind the limb of its satellite, the globe of the Earth, huge and luminous and alive, and there Jerry was, at long impossible last, rounding the Moon, and looking back on all of cis-lunar space from the apogee of the spaceship’s orbit, hanging weightless at the apogee of his own life.

Did he see those sparkling motes moving out there between the Moon and its planet, or were they more floaters in his field of vision, projections in his mind’s eye? It didn’t really matter, for he
did
see them, and they
were
there, the satellites and the Cosmograds, the battle stations and Spaceville, the lights of the present and future celestial city of man.

“There will be a short retroburn now to circularize our orbit,” the captain said behind him. The ship juddered as the maneuvering thrusters fired, and it turned end for end, turned the observation bubble away from the Earth, away from the Moon, away from the birthplace, toward the face of the infinite vastness of the future, toward the unthinkably distant stars.

Surely
these
moving points of light had to be artifacts, visual distortions, projections of the heart’s desire, but he
did
see them, as clearly as if he had been granted a vision of the far future that he would never live to see—Grand Tour Navettes moving out toward Mars and Jupiter and beyond, starships headed for planets circling far-distant suns.

The retroburn crushed him back into the padding, his breathing became labored, his heart seemed to flutter wildly, and pain shot down his legs and arms.

But it didn’t last long, and he scarcely noticed it, for he was walking on water, soaring out among the stars, out into the future, out where he had always belonged.

They turned the ship again, and once more the Moon lay beneath him, but now the
GTN
was in a low circular orbit, sweeping majestically across the landscape of another world, great sharply
shadowed craters and jagged uneroded mountains, pockmarked wastelands, and desert dusts, pearlescent in the hard sunlight, oh so
real
in the unnaturally sharp focus of the airless void.

They crossed the terminator again, swept over the nightside, then back over the sunlit surface.

And as they completed the full orbit, Jerry could see it down there on the surface below, and this was no illusion, this was unmistakable, the flash of the great solar mirror, the tiny sharp shapes outlined against the pearly brilliance, the round dot of the red circle they had painted on the surface to proclaim “Here we are!”

Lunagrad. The permanent human settlement that man had planted on another world.

It didn’t matter that that ensign was red, that those were Russians down there. They were humans, and they were living their lives on another planet, and from this vantage, that was all that mattered, they were humans, they were walking on water, and so was he.

“Take the conn, please, Mr. Reed,” the captain said.

“Fly her?” Jerry muttered, unable to take his eyes away from the vision before him.

“Just follow the captain’s marks,” the pilot said. “The computer will do the rest.”

The joystick felt strangely cool and glassy in Jerry’s grasp.

“On my mark,” the captain said as they sped toward the sharp nightside divide.

“Mark!”

They crossed into darkness, and the stars came out, and Jerry pulled straight back on the joystick, and felt the main engine fire. But this time the pressure and the pain seemed to be happening to someone else, for he was riding a mighty rocket, he was in command of its vast forces, he was flying his own spaceship around another world.

“Ten seconds . . .”

The joystick was like a huge cold bowl of chocolate ice cream in a child’s hands.

You’re too young to understand what you’re going to see tonight, but you’re not too young to understand a whole pint of Häagen-Dazs. . . .

“Twenty seconds . . .”

The strange pearlescent television-gray lunar landscape coming up under the lander camera . . . The hollow descending hiss of the retrorockets through the bulkhead . . .

The Eagle has landed . . .

“Twenty five . . .”

The bulky figure descending the ladder in slow motion . . .

“Shutdown.”

The foot coming down on the gray pumice and changing the destiny of the species forever.

Jerry recentered the joystick and floated upward into a sparkly starry dark, but as the Grand Tour Navette rounded the limb of the Moon, a brilliant blue globe appeared at the end of the narrowing black tunnel, the Earth seen from beyond the gravity well, from beyond the onrushing darkness, looking back at him from where it had all started, looking back at him from the future he would never live to see.

But he had lived to see
this
.

That’s . . . uh . . . one small step for mankind, one giant leap for a man.

“Mr. Reed? Mr. Reed?”

Jerry’s vision was growing blurry now, the inky waters were rolling over him, all that he could see was a brilliant blue circle opening up before him, all he could feel was the wonderful chocolate taste in his mouth.

“Mr. Reed? Mr. Reed? Can you tell the world what it feels like to have finally made it? To fly to the Moon?”

“Like the biggest bowl of chocolate ice cream in the world,” Jerry said into the microphone quite clearly before he sighed and let it carry him up and away.

“What a sight this is! Who would have believed such a thing was possible a few short dark weeks ago? But here it comes, a Russian plane, an Aeroflot Concordski, touching down on the runway at San Francisco Airport to bring a dying American hero home!

“The plane is turning toward the terminal now, the engine of the ambulance helicopter is already running. It is reported that Jerry Reed’s condition has deteriorated further in the last few hours, the planned press conference has been canceled, and he will be taken directly to the hospital and placed in intensive care. . . .

“I have a feeling the world will long remember these pictures, ladies and gentlemen. I have a feeling this is like the first shot of a mushroom-pillar cloud, or the very first footage of the Earth as a planet rising over the surface of the Moon. That shot of the first Aeroflot flight to touch down on American soil in a generation is an image that will forever mark the border between an old world and the new.”

—NBC

The strain of reentry had been far too much, they had almost lost him, and after an hour of circling and messages back and forth between
Washington and Moscow, the Soviet Concordski had finally been allowed to land at the San Francisco airport.