Voyage (36 page)

The panel seemed complex, almost ludicrously so. How the hell was she going to find her way around all this?

She experimented with the switches. They were mostly of two types: little silver three-way tabs, or – for more critical functions – cylindrical levers, two-way, that you had to pull out before they would move. These would be awkward in pressure-suit gloves, she thought. The switches were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. She worked her way across the panel, practicing flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

There were little diagrams etched into the panel, she saw, circuit and flowcharts. She consulted her manuals. Here, for example, was one diagram which connected a set of switches that controlled water output from the fuel cells. The little gray lines mirrored the way the water flowed, either to controls for the storage tanks, or for the dumps.

All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once she started to see the system behind the diagrams, she began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, she worked her way through her manuals, learning how the spaceship was flown.

The convoy of buses skirted around Moscow, following the freeways. They were heading northeast, toward Kaliningrad. There was a lot of traffic, most of it freight, and the road was lined with apartment blocks, huge, drab monoliths.

Joe Muldoon stared out of a grimy window. It was the most depressing sight he had ever seen.

Here they were, hauling ass direct from the airport, straight out of the city to Starry Town. This was Muldoon’s second visit here. Their first trip out had been better. Then, the American crew – Muldoon, Bleeker and Stone, with the NASA technical people and program managers – had stayed in an Intourist Hotel. It was no palace, but it was right in the middle of downtown Moscow, with Red Square and the Kremlin a walk away. Every morning the Soviets had arrived with buses to take the Americans out to Starry. Town, and every evening they’d brought them back.

And the hotel had had a bar, in the basement.

That bar had proved to be a magnet for foreign nationals, one of the few congenial places in the city. There were other Americans to be found there, and Germans, Cubans, Czechs. Muldoon and the NASA guys had made that bar their own.

There’d been no harm done, save for a few late nights and bleary mornings. But in retrospect, he could see the problem for the program managers. Not to mention the Soviets.
In that bar, they are out of control, those Americanskis!

So this time out, things were arranged differently.

At Kaliningrad the convoy turned east toward Shchelkovo. The architecture changed. Now there were wooden houses, along both sides of the road; unlike the Soviet-style apartments closer to Moscow, these were painted brightly, and they were decorated with ornate wood carvings. Muldoon could smell wood smoke. And every few hundred yards there were hand-pumps.

It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand-pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.

The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings
here, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.

Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.

This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.

The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.

Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to
him,
anywhere, even though he’d gone so much further than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.

His apartment was huge. More like a suite. He wandered through the rooms. The place was crammed with furniture, all of it heavy and old-fashioned: sofas, overstuffed chairs, heavy tables. There was a thick shag pile on the floor, and flock paper on every inch of wall. He found the bathroom, and there he had to laugh. There was no soap, and there were no plugs for the bath or sink, and only one towel.

And probably a bug in every damn light fitting.

He glanced out of the window. He saw white pines, barbed wire. A black limousine cruised along one of the central access roads: probably KGB, Muldoon thought.
Home from home. Like a fucking prison camp
.

He jammed a facecloth in the plug hole and ran a bath.

He dressed in his dinner suit and went down to the bar.

It wasn’t much like the Intourist place in Moscow. But there was a barman, polishing glasses; he had a thin, Asiatic face. Muldoon asked for a beer. It proved to be cold; it was a Czech brand, and it tasted good. There was nobody else here. Some kind of god-awful piano music tinkled over a PA.

There was going to be a reception tonight, before a dinner in the place’s dining room, all to celebrate the progress of Moonlab-Soyuz. Fred Michaels himself was supposed to be here, and God alone knew how many Soviet big fish.
You’ll have to take it easy, Muldoon. Watch what you say. No more hostages to fortune
. He knew
what to expect at the dinner, though: meat, lots of it, with piles of cream and butter. Deliciously bad for him.

He was clapped on the back. ‘My friend Joe. I thought I might find you the first here. Welcome back to
Zvezdnoy Gorodok,
to Starry Town. You are still drinking that warmed-over piss you prefer, I see. Barman!’ Vladimir Viktorenko snapped his fingers.

The barman delivered a bottle of vodka, two glasses, and a small bowl of salt. ‘Here. Drink. Mother’s milk,’ Viktorenko ordered. He poured out a glass for Muldoon.

Muldoon took a lick of salt, then threw back the liquid; it was tasteless, harsh, clawing at his throat. ‘Thank you, my friend,’ he said in his hesitant Russian. ‘Immediately you appear a much more handsome fellow.’ The idea was that in lunar orbit, the Americans would speak Russian and the Soviets English. Muldoon was finding the language training the hardest part of the whole damn program.

Viktorenko bellowed out a laugh. He took a drink himself. ‘Tonight, all five of us will drink from this bottle, and we will sign the label. When we have returned from the Moon we will meet again, and toast our success from the very same bottle.’ He poured Muldoon another glass.

‘To the mission,’ Muldoon said.

‘Oh, no.’ Viktorenko threw up his hands in mock horror. ‘One must not say such things. In Russia, this is bad luck. Seven hundred hours of Russian lessons, and they did not teach you this?
Tsk
. We should toast our preparations. That is enough.’

‘Our preparations, then.’ Muldoon drank again.

Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko was something of a legend among the cosmonauts – among the astronauts too, come to that. He was stocky, jovial, full of energy; his broad head with its graying crew-cut looked as if it had been bolted to his shoulders, and his ruddy cheeks were puffed up. All that borscht and potatoes. He was of the same vintage as Muldoon, roughly: he had applied to join the cosmonaut program in its first recruitment sweep, in 1960. He had co-piloted the Voskhod 3 mission in 1966, a flight in which an adapted one-man Vostok capsule had taken two men, precariously, into orbit, and Viktorenko had watched as his co-pilot had taken a space walk out of a flimsy blow-up airlock.

There had been a rumor that Viktorenko had been the Soviets’ prime candidate for their abandoned lunar landing program. Muldoon had tried probing about that, but Viktorenko wouldn’t open up.

And now here was Viktorenko as Muldoon’s counterpart, the commander of the Soviet crew for Moonlab-Soyuz.

Viktorenko asked after Jill, Muldoon’s wife, whom he’d met, and charmed the pants off, in Houston.

Muldoon just shrugged.

Jill hadn’t been too ecstatic about him being back on the active roster, and returning to the
Moon,
for God’s sake. Now, truth to tell, he wasn’t sure if she’d even be there for him, when he got back from this jaunt.

There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He had to fly; for him that was a parameter, a fact he had to live with. Even to the exclusion of Jill. He didn’t express any of this, but he sensed Viktorenko understood, and the cosmonaut didn’t press him.

Muldoon felt himself mellowing as the vodka went to work; he washed it down with a little more Czech beer.

Now the bar was beginning to fill up, mostly with NASA engineering staff, and a few Soviets. Adam Bleeker walked in, nodded to Muldoon, and made toward the bar.

It was encouraging to see the American and Soviet teams working together properly, Muldoon thought. It had taken a long time. The idea of joint flights had been opposed by the Soviets because of a distrust of Americans – and from within the US, for suspicion that the Soviets’ true motives for cooperating were all about getting their hands on American technology.

But that was a lot of crap, Muldoon thought. After all both Soyuz and Moonlab/Apollo technologies were ten years old now; what the hell was there to steal? Besides, Carter and Ted Kennedy were putting a lot of muscle behind this trip now; for Carter, the Moonlab stunt – originally a scheme of Nixon’s – had become a way of symbolizing his achievement in getting the Soviets to sign up to the SALT II treaty.

Sometimes, Muldoon felt bewildered by the pace of change; it seemed to accelerate as he got older.

‘You know, Vladimir, we’ve been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it still seems odd to me sometimes that here we are, you and I, drinking vodka together in a Moscow bar. Even one run by the KGB.’

‘How so?’

‘If things had turned out differently, I might have found myself flying solo into Moscow with two nukes strapped under my wings, instead of my pajamas and toothbrush.’

‘Nukes,’ Viktorenko said. ‘Indeed. And now we are comrades
again. But that is what makes us unique, men like you and I, Joe. We are aviators. We rise to our mission, whatever it may be. To the edge of the envelope, and beyond. Once our mission was to ferry nukes. And now our mission is to shake hands in space. And that we will do, as well as we can. These others – the paper-pushers, even the engineers: these others can never understand such things. It has always been so.

‘Why, I remember my induction into the Vostok program,’ he said. ‘I was put into an isolation chamber. A box. For several weeks. And then a thermal chamber, and then a decompression chamber. And then, straight away, I was taken to the airport, put on a plane, and ordered to parachute back to Earth. The doctors, the quacks, justified such treatment by saying they needed to know how I would react on the abrupt change from an enclosed cabin to the boundlessness of infinite space.
Ha.’

‘Colonel Muldoon. Lieutenant-Colonel Viktorenko. Good to see you here …’

It was Fred Michaels. The NASA Administrator stood not two feet away from Muldoon, his jowls peppered lightly with sweat; behind him Muldoon recognized the Assistant Administrator, Josephson, the quintessential paper-pusher.

Viktorenko made Michaels effusively welcome, and insisted on pouring him and Josephson slugs of vodka.

Tim Josephson drew Muldoon away from the others. ‘I’m sorry to bother you with this now, Joe. But we need a decision from your crew tonight.’

‘On what?’

Josephson opened up a folder. ‘The call-sign for your Apollo on the Moonlab-Soyuz flight. As you know, at the instigation of Congress, we’ve been holding a competition for elementary and high school students to come up with a name.’ He began shuffling pieces of paper in the folder. ‘We had seven thousand entries, submitted by teams totalling seventy-one thousand schoolchildren. Each name had to be backed up by a classroom project. The judging criteria were: eighty per cent for the quality and creativity of the project, and twenty per cent on the name’s clarity during transmission, and its ability to convey the American spirit. And –’

‘Oh, give me a break, Josephson. For Christ’s sake.’

‘I have a shortlist of the twenty-nine finalists here. We’re behind schedule with this already. I thought if you and the crew could get together tonight on this, and –’

Muldoon threw back another vodka. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.

Josephson, behind his glasses, looked shocked. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked down for a minute, as if composing himself.

Then, when he looked up, his face was hard.

‘Colonel Muldoon. Perhaps we could discuss this elsewhere. Your room?’

Michaels looked furious, thunderous. Vladimir Viktorenko winked at him.

Ah, hell
. ‘Sure. Let’s go.’

Muldoon drained his vodka.

‘Listen, Josephson. I –’

‘You listen to me.’

Josephson was still just a skinny streak of piss, but he was in absolute control of himself, Muldoon realized; and, in the confines of Muldoon’s room, he had suddenly become genuinely intimidating. ‘I’m tired of your drama queen incompetence, Colonel, the way you’re prepared to embarrass yourself, the Agency and the government, even here. You and those other space cadets of yours are damn lucky to have got this flight at all. We’ve heard your public pronouncements. We know you were pissed at the cancelation of the last Moon landings. We know you think the joint flight is just a PR stunt. We know you think you’re stuck here working on creaky Soviet technology.’

Muldoon had a deepening sense of danger. ‘Look –’

‘I had to go in front of Congress because of the way you mouthed off against the Agency.
You,
Muldoon. The astronauts go in there and they’re treated like heroes. I went in and I was totally humiliated. That is never going to happen to me again. Is that clear? Now take this list.’