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 s
tarted, 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.
That had been a glorious, and terrible, and infuriating moment for Bobby, the cheers, and the lights, and the cameras, Dad’s ashen face as they lowered the gurney from the plane, the mad dash wheeling him through the press of reporters to the helicopter, the microphones shoved in his face . . .
Too much had gone on too fast for Bobby to really have time to feel anything, and now, locked in an awful deathwatch in a hospital room in Palo Alto, he found himself almost wishing the press, with its noise and lights, would find this place and burst into the room waving microphones and cameras.
Anything to break this deathly stillness.
Franja stood beside him, numb and stony-eyed. Mom, who had long since cried herself dry, sat by the bedside. Dr. Burton stood at the other side of the bed, watching the life-signs monitors expectantly, a sunny blond vulture in medical greens. Sara hung back at the rear of the room, looking rather lost.
Dad lay in the bed, breathing shallowly, and Bobby tried to convince himself that his father was feeling no pain, that he was just finally slipping away into a dreamless sleep.
He had been conscious only three times on the trip back from the Moon, and, according to Franja, he had not really been coherent, babbling things she could not understand.
“But his face, Bobby,” Franja told him, “you should have seen it. I never saw him look so happy.”
Dad had been at the edge of death by the time they had helicoptered him to Immortality, Inc., but he rallied tantalizingly under intensive medical care, hanging on for three days now, neither quite dead, nor truly alive.
“If only we could blue-max him,” Burton had fretted. “But no, we have to wait for clinical brain death, it’s the damn law!”
And so the awful deathwatch had begun, and continued, and dragged, on, and on, and on, until now Bobby could only stand there, wishing for it to be over, wishing for his father to finally die.
“Sonya . . .”
Dad’s eyes were still shut, but they were moving fitfully beneath his eyelids like those of a man in a dream, and his lips were moving weakly, and out of them came a dry whispery sound.
“I’m here, Jerry!” Mom said, squeezing his hand.
Dad’s eyes slowly opened, swept weakly around the room, closed again. “I did it,” he whispered, “I walked on water.”
Bobby shot a glance at Burton, who nodded and departed. Then Bobby took Franja’s hand, and they knelt down by the bedside.
“Yeah, Dad,” he said softly, “you really are a bona fide citizen of outer space now.”
Dad’s eyes opened again and looked right at him for what Bobby knew would be the last time. And there was something in them, something brave, and crazy, and somehow satisfied, that almost let him make his peace with that.
“It’s okay, Bob,” Dad told him, as if reading his heart. “I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, it’s not the end, just the end of the beginning . . .”
“Father—”
“What a life you’re going to have, Franja!” Dad said. “You’re going to live in the golden age of space travel. You’re going to be one of the people who makes it all happen. Someday you’re going to sail one of our little canoes into the harbor of a great galactic city. I know it. I’ve seen it. It’s out there waiting for us, you and me, Franja, you and me. . . .”
Franja burst into tears. Bobby hugged her to him.
Father smiled. “You two go now, please,” he said. “I think your mother and I would like to be alone. Take care of each other. Let me remember you like this at the end.”
“Oh, Father!”
“Let it be, big sister, let it be,” Bobby said, and he led her away.
“Sonya . . . I want you to do something for me,” Jerry whispered, his voice growing dimmer with every syllable, his eyes closing heavily at the very end.
“Anything, love . . . ,” Sonya said, leaning closer. “Jerry? Jerry?”
Slowly Jerry’s head rolled over on the pillow toward her, slowly, even more slowly, he fought to open his eyes one last time. And then they were looking right at her, and were it not for what she saw there, she would have quite fallen apart.
But Jerry’s eyes were bright and strong, and his dry cracked lips were creased in a faint smile. “Don’t cry, Sonya,” he whispered. “I’ve been there . . . I’ve seen it . . . starships sailing through the darkness like great ocean liners toward cities circling far distant suns . . . that’s where we’re all going, Sonya, won’t it be grand . . . ?”
Sonya didn’t know whether to rage or to laugh or to cry.
Even now! Even at death’s door! Still her urban spaceman to the very end! Never had she loved him more.
She had always thought she had loved him in spite of this.
Now she finally understood that this was the heart of everything she had loved him for.
“Sonya . . . Sonya . . .”
“Yes, Jerry, I’m here.”
“I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything, love.”
Jerry’s eyes looked down at the hibernautika sitting by his bedside, back into her eyes. “Turn me off,” he said.
“Jerry!”
“Turn me off, Sonya!” he said much more strongly. “Let me go!”
“Don’t ask me to do that!” Sonya cried. “You know I can’t!”
“Sure you can, Sonya,” Jerry told her. “It’ll be just like going to sleep. Like Rip van Winkle. And I’ll wake up in a brand-new world.”
“Oh, Jerry,” she cried, despite herself, “how can you talk like that even now?”
“Because I believe it, Sonya.”
“You really believe it?” Sonya sobbed.
“Of course I do. I’ve seen it. I know it. This is the beginning of the golden age of miracles. Impossible dreams are happening every day. You’re the one who’s always telling me to read the papers, Sonya.”
“Oh, Jerry, I just can’t stand the thought of losing you!” Sonya moaned. “Is that so wrong?”
Jerry’s lips creased in a weak little smile that his eyes made absolutely radiant. “Then let’s no
t lose each other, Sonya,” he said. “Live a good long happy life,” he told her. “Think of it as a nice long separate vacation. But when it’s over—”
“Jerry—”
“—when it’s over, you come home to me.”
“Oh, Jerry!”
“Let them put you in the time machine too, Sonya. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“Oh, Jerry, Jerry . . .”
“Promise me, Sonya!”
“I promise, love,” Sonya said, willing to say anything to avoid saying the final good-bye.
Jerry sighed. He squeezed her hand one last time before his strength failed him. His head rolled away from her with a heartbreaking smile, and he stared at something he saw on the ceiling, smiling still.
“I’ve got a wonderful idea, Sonya,” he whispered. “Have them put it in our contracts. Let’s not let them wake us up for five hundred years. Let’s not wake up until we can take the grand tour together again, let’s begin our new lives with a long second honeymoon out among the stars. Wouldn’t you like to do that, Sonya?”
“More than anything else in the world . . . ,” Sonya said quite truthfully.
“Don’t you believe that we will?”
“Yes, Jerry, I do,” she lied.
“Then I’m ready to go there now,” Jerry said. “Time to pull my plug.” And he closed his eyes and spoke no more.
Sonya sat there by the bedside for a long, long time, listening to his agonized breathing falter away, watching his smiling tranquil face freezing into its final mask, crying and crying and crying, and waiting for some outside force to end this endless moment.
But nothing did.
Nothing would.
And somehow, she knew, nothing should.
Finally, she thought of the foolish promise she had made him, to join him five hundred years after this moment was ended, a promise that had been made without belief, but now, she suddenly knew, not without a commitment of the heart.
And that had been his parting gift to her, a gift that she now saw had been hers for the taking all along if only she had made the leap of faith to seize it.
Russian Spring Page 74
