When dawn came Rick was ready, and made one pass, and a second, and cursed, and eased forward and felt the slight contact of the two ships, and the instruments showed contact at center, and Rick drove forward, hard…
“Virgin no more!” he shouted.
“Houston, this is Apollo. We have docking. I say again, we have docking,” Baker said.
“We know,” a dry voice said from below. “Colonel Delanty’s mike was live.”
“Woops,” Rick said.
“Apollo, this is Houston, your partners are approaching, Soyuz has you in visual. I say again, Soyuz has visual contact.”
“Roger, Houston.” Baker turned to Rick. “So now you stabilize this mother, while I talk friendly Asian brother—and sister. Soyuz, Soyuz, this is Apollo. Over.”
“Apollo, this is Soyuz,” a male voice said. Jakov’s English was grammatically perfect, and almost without accent. He’d studied with American-speaking teachers, not Britishers. “Apollo, we copy you five by five. Is your docking maneuver completed, interrogative? Over.”
“We are docked with Hammerlab. It is safe to approach. Over.”
“Apollo, this is Soyuz. By ‘Hammerlab’ do you mean Spacelab Two, interrogative? Over.”
Baker said, “Affirmative.”
Delanty was aware that he was using too much fuel. No one but a perfectionist would have noticed that; the maneuver was well within the error program devised by Houston. But Rick Delanty cared.
Eventually they were stable: Apollo, its nose buried in the docking port in one end of the garbage can that was Hammerlab, both now stable in space, not wobbling and not tumbling. The Apollo led, at 25,000 feet per second: Baker and Delanty, ass-backward around the Earth each ninety minutes.
“Done,” Rick said. “Now let’s watch them try.”
“Rojj,” Baker said. He activated a camera system. There was a cable connector in the docking mechanism, and the picture came through perfectly: a view of Soyuz, massive and closer than they’d expected, approaching Hammerlab from the far side. The Soyuz grew, nose on. It wobbled slightly in its orbit, showing its massive bulk: Soyuz was considerably larger than the Apollo. The Soviets had always had their big military boosters to assist their space program, while NASA designed and built special equipment.
“That big mother better not have forgotten the lunch,” Delanty said. “Or it will get hungry up here.”
“Yep.” Baker continued to watch.
The Soyuz was vital to the Hammerlab mission. It had brought up most of the consumables. Hammerlab was packed with instruments and film and experiments; but there was food and water and air for only a few days. They needed Soyuz to stay for Hamner-Brown’s approach.
“Maybe it will anyway,” Johnny Baker said. He looked grimly at the screen, and at the maneuvering Soviet vehicle.
Watching was painful.
Soyuz floundered like a dead whale in the tide. It nosed violently toward the camera and shied as violently back. It edged sideways, stopped—almost; tried again and drifted away.
“And that’s their best pilot,” Baker muttered.
“I didn’t look too good myself—”
“Bullshit. You had a tumbling target. We’re as stable as a streetcar.” Baker watched a few moments more and shook his head. “Not their fault, of course. Control systems. We’ve got the onboard computers. They don’t. But it’s a bloody damned shame.”
Rick Delanty’s mahogany face wrinkled. “Don’t know I can take much more of this, Johnny.”
It was excruciating for both of them. It made the fingers flex, itching to take over. Backseat drivers are formed by such tensions.
“And he’s got the lunch,” Baker said. “When’s he going to give up?”
They entered darkness. Communications with Soyuz were limited to official messages. When they came into the light again, the Soviet craft approached once more.
“It’s going to get hungry up here,” Delanty said.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not possible in a full pressure suit.”
They watched again. Eventually Jakov called: “We are wasting needed fuel. Request Plan B.”
“Soyuz, roger, stand by to implement Plan B,” Baker said with visible relief. He winked at Delanty. “Now show the commies what a real American can do.”
Plan B was officially an emergency measure, but all the American mission planners had predicted privately that it would be needed. In the U.S. they’d trained as if Plan B would be the normal mode of operation. Across the Atlantic it was hoped it wouldn’t be needed—but they’d planned on it too. Plan B was simple: The Soyuz stabilized itself, and the Apollo-Hammerlab monstrosity maneuvered to it.
Delanty was flying a spacecraft and a big, clumsy, massive tin can. (Now picture an aircraft carrier trying to maneuver under a descending airplane.) But he also had the world’s most sophisticated computer system, attitude controls painstakingly turned out by master machinists with thousands of hours’ experience, instruments developed in a dozen laboratories accustomed to making precision instruments.
“Houston, Houston, Plan B under way,” Baker reported.
And now the whole damned world’s watching me. Or listening, Rick Delanty thought. And if I blow it…
That was unthinkable.
“Relax,” Baker said.
He didn’t offer to do it himself, Delanty thought. Well. Here goes. Just like on the simulator.
It was. One straight thrust; check just before contact, and a tiny pulse of the jets to move the two crafts together. Again the mechanical feel of contact, and simultaneously the flare of green lights on the board.
“Latch it,” Rick said.
“Soyuz, we are docked, latch the docking probe,” Baker called.
“Apollo, affirmative. We are locked on.”
“Last one inside’s a rotten egg,” Baker said.
They shook hands, formally, all around, as they floated inside the big tin can. A historic occasion, the commentators were saying below; but Baker couldn’t think of any historic words to say.
There was just too damned much to do. This wasn’t spectacular, a handshake in space like Apollo-Soyuz. This was a working mission, with a hairy schedule that they probably couldn’t keep up with, even with luck.
And yet…Baker had the urge to laugh. He might have if it wouldn’t have needed so many explanations. He would have laughed at how good they all looked.
God bless us, there’s none like us. Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik was darkly beautiful. With her imperious self-confidence she could have played a czarina, but her smooth, hard muscles would better have fitted her for the prima ballerina’s role. A cold and lovely woman.
Heartbreaker, Johnny Baker thought. But secretly vulnerable, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes. I wonder if she’s as coldly polite with everyone as she is with Brigadier Jakov?
Brigadier Pieter Ivanovitch Jakov, Hero of the People (which class? Baker wondered); the perfect man to illustrate an enlistment poster. Handsome, well muscled, cold eyes: He looked a lot like Johnny Baker himself, and this wasn’t really more surprising than Rick Delanty’s superficial resemblance to Muhammad Ali.
Four of us, fully mature specimens in the prime of athletic good health—and photogenic as hell to boot. Pity that Randall fellow from NBS isn’t here to take a group picture. But he’ll get one. Eventually.
They floated at strange angles to each other, and shifted as in vagrant breezes, smiling at nothing. Even for Baker and Jakov it was exhilarating, and they’d been up before. For Rick and Leonilla it was sheer heaven. They tended to drift toward the viewports and stare at the stars and Earth.
“Did you bring the lunch?” Delanty asked.
Leonilla smiled. The smile was cold. “Of course. I think you will enjoy it. But I will not harm Comrade Jakov’s surprise.”
“First we have to find a place to eat it,” Baker said. He looked around the crowded capsule.
“We can eat in the Soyuz,” Leonilla suggested. “It is packed, but…” She waved helplessly.
“It is not what we have been given to expect,” Jakov said. “I have spoken to Baikunyar, and we are now on our own for a few hours until we can deploy the solar wings. But I suggest we eat first.”
“What’s not what you’ve been given to expect?” Delanty asked.
“This.” Jakov waved expressively.
John Baker laughed. “There wasn’t time to do any real planning. Just pile the stuff aboard. Otherwise, everything here would have been designed especially for comet watching, at half the weight—”
“And nine times the cost,” Delanty said.
“And then there would have been no need of us,” Leonilla Malik said.
Jakov looked at her coldly. He started to say something, but decided not to. It was true enough, and they all knew it.
“Jesus, they sure packed it in,” Delanty said. “Let’s eat.”
“You feel no effect? From the free fall?” Leonilla asked.
“Him? Old Iron Ear?” John Baker laughed. “Hell, he eats lunch on roller coasters. Now me, I feel it a bit, and I’ve been here before. It goes away.”
“We should eat now. We are entering darkness, and we will want to deploy the solar wings in light,” Jakov said. “I, too, suggest the Soyuz, where there is more room. And we have a surprise. Caviar. It should be eaten in bowls, but doubtless we can make do from tubes.”
“Caviar?” Baker said.
“It is high in food value,” Leonilla said. “And soon the new canal will be finished and there will be plenty of water in the Caspian and the Volga for our sturgeon. I hope you like caviar—”
“Sure,” Baker said.
“Shall we get to it?” Jakov led the way into the Soyuz.
No one noticed that Rick Delanty held back, as if reluctant to begin lunch after all.
Delanty and Baker were outside. Thin lines connected them to Hammerlab; around them was the vacuum of space, brightly lit in sunshine, dark as the darkest cave in shadow.
Skylab had wings covered with solar cells. They were supposed to deploy automatically, but they hadn’t.
Hammerlab had a different design. The wings were folded against the body, and were designed to be deployed by human musclepower. Baker and Delanty supplied that.
The solar-cell power was all needed. Without it they couldn’t operate the laboratory—or even keep it cool enough to live in. Space is not cold. It has no temperature at all: There is no air to give it a temperature. Objects in sunlight absorb heat, which must be pumped out. Human beings generate even more heat: No man can live long in an insulated environment, whether a pressure suit or a space capsule. A man generates more heat inside each cubic inch of his body than the Sun does in each cubic inch of its surface. Of course, there are a great many cubic inches of Sun…
So they needed the solar cells, and that took work. They moved large masses—in space there is no weight, but the mass remains—against friction. Their pressure suits resisted every motion, but eventually it was done. Nothing was broken, nothing was jammed. The system had been designed for simplicity—and to use the talents of intelligent men in orbit.
“At last,” Johnny Baker said. “And we’ve got a few minutes’ oxygen left. Rick, take a moment to enjoy the view.”
“Good,” Rick huffed into his mike.
Baker didn’t like the way he said it. Delanty was breathing too hard, and too irregularly. But he said nothing.
“I thought that last one would never come loose,” Delanty puffed.
“But it did come loose. And if it hadn’t, we’d have fixed it,” Baker said. “Those goddam bastards with their perfect black boxes. Well, this time they gave me the tools for the job. There’s nothing a man can’t do with the right tools.”
“Sure, it’s all a piece of cake now.”
“Right. No worries. Barring a few international tensions, a possible Cuban hijacker, and several masses of dirty ice moving at fifty miles a second—our way.”
“That’s a relief.” Huff! “Hey, John, I see South Africa. Only—you can’t tell where the international boundaries leave off. No national borders. Johnny, I’m on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough.”
“You can’t see the lines of latitude and longitude either, but that doesn’t make them unimportant.”
“Um.”
“So you can’t see international borders from space, and everyone tries to make a big point of it. If we keep that up, you know what’ll happen?”
Rick laughed. “Yeah. Everybody’s gonna start painting their borders in neon orange a mile wide. Then all the college kids will scream about damage to the environment—”
“And blame you for starting it. Let’s go in.”
June: Interludes
But what about a direct head-on collision with a comet? How big and massive are the heads of comets? The head of a comet consists of two parts. The solid nucleus and the glowing coma. We only have to worry about the nucleus. Of course, comets vary a good deal in size. One estimate is that the nucleus of an average comet is 1.2 miles in diameter. But a really huge comet may have a nucleus thousands of miles in diameter. Any comet that hits the earth directly is going to pack quite a wallop.
Daniel Cohen, How the World Will End
“Woe to you, my people! For have you not raised the abomination of desolation across the Earth? Have you not seen the wickedness of the cities, and smelt the very stench of the air itself? Have you not defiled the Earth, which is the very temple of the Lord?
“Hear the words of the Prophet Malachi: ‘For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
“‘But unto you that fear my name shall the Son of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.’
“My people, the Hammer of God comes to smite the wicked and the proud; but the humble shall be exalted. Repent, while there is yet time; for no man can escape the mighty Hammer that even now blots out the stars. Repent, before it is too late. There is yet time.”
“Thank you, Reverend Armitage. You have heard the Reverend Henry Armitage and ‘The Coming Hour.’”
■
Mark Czescu had the saki heating in a reagent bottle with a ground-glass stopper. He poured refills into tiny cups, then poured more saki into the bottle and set it back in water simmering on the stove.
“I had two plants sitting on my desk,” he said. “One was a rubber marijuana plant, with ‘cannabis sativa’ stamped under the leaves. The other was an Aralia elegantissima. If you don’t know, it looks a lot like marijuana.” He handed a cup to Joanna, another to Lilith. “One day my boss came in with a bigwig from the central office. They didn’t say anything that day, but the next day my boss was saying, ‘Get rid of it.’” He handed Frank Stoner the third cup, and settled in the armchair with his own. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I’m not completely ignorant, you know. I know what that is.’ Carol Miller went into hysterics. She called the other guys in and we made him repeat it. They all knew what it was.”
Frank Stoner sprawled in sinful comfort on the couch, with Joanna MacPherson under one arm and the other around Lilith Hathaway’s waist. Lilith was his own height, five nine, but tiny Joanna’s shoulders just fit beneath Frank’s thick arm. He asked, “How long ago was that?”
“Couple of years. They had to lay m
e off two months later.”
Frank grinned. “By one of those interesting statistical flukes?”
“Huh? No, it had nothing to do with the rubber marijuana. They just had to lay off some people. Since then…Well, the steadiest work has been with Harv Randall.” Mark leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “Those man-in-the-street gigs are fun. We met this army colonel who was afraid to open his mouth, afraid something would get out. There was a guy at a wrestling match who couldn’t wait for Hammerfall. That’s when the real he-men will rule the world, right?” He smiled at Lilith, who was a pale blonde with a lovely heart-shaped face and big boobs. He’d met Lilith at the Interchange, the topless bar where she danced.
Frank Stoner was sipping just enough saki to be polite. Mark hadn’t noticed. He emptied his cup in one swallow—you had to drink it fast or it would get cold—and said, “We even interviewed some bikers. The Unholy Rollers were in that night. I don’t think they took it seriously, though.”
Joanna laughed. “End of the world. No cars on the road. No fuzz. Your biker friends would think that was fat city.”
“But they couldn’t say that.”
“It’s maybe true,” said Frank Stoner. He and Mark had met on the dirt tracks, fighting it out for prize money across the country. “We can go places cars can’t. We don’t use as much gas. We stick together. We don’t mind a fight. If we had some gas cached somewhere…Hey. What are the chances?”
Mark waved a hand and almost hit his cup. “Almost zilch, unless you believe the astrology columns. Sharps says we might go through the tail, though. Man, won’t that be a kick!”
Joanna explained, “Sharps is one of the astronomers they interviewed.” She got up to refill saki cups.
“Yeah, and he was stranger than any of them! You’ll see it on TV. Hey, did you know that Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this month?” He gave it a good dramatic pause—during which Joanna got the giggles—before he went on.
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