Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  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.’

  Staring into Josephson’s narrow, calculating eyes, Muldoon saw everything – his whole life, all his aspirations – narrow into this one moment. The road to Mars lies through this bottleneck, this piece of paper, the seventy thousand high school kids and their seven thousand fucking names, in this shitty room on the wrong side of the planet. I really have to do this.

  And the lightness of the Moon was, after all, a long time ago.

  He took the list from Josephson. He looked at the names on it. Adventure. Blake. Eagle. Endurance …

  Josephson said, ‘Do you want me to go find Phil and –’

  ‘No. I’m the commander. Here.’ He stabbed at a name. ‘This one.’

  Josephson looked at the paper. ‘Grissom.’

  ‘The commander of Apollo 1.’

  Josephson studied Muldoon’s face for a moment; then he nodded. He turned, and left the room.

  Muldoon splashed water in his face. Then he went back to the bar, and started working on getting seriously drunk.

  Thursday, April 10, 1980

  Ellington Air Force Base, Houston

  It took her an hour to get suited up, in the personal gear room.

  The safety instructions alone were intimidating enough. Hundreds of facts were thrown at her, about D-rings and lanyards and oxygen bottles and hypoxia and survival procedures … My God. And I’m only going to be a passenger in the damn thing.

  But now here she was, trussed up in a flight suit, with an oxygen mask, straps everywhere, a parachute, emergency oxygen, intercoms, survival kits for several unlikely environments tucked into her pockets. There was a sick bag in a pouch on her leg. She even had her own flight helmet, a World War One-style Snoopy hat. Look at me, the newest fighter jock hero.

  She walked out to the field. There was Phil Stone, the senior astronaut who was going to take her up today. Stone was tall, proudly bald, the best part of fifty. He grinned and shook her hand with a big gloved mitt. ‘Welcome to the carnie ride,’ he said.

  She smiled back uncertainly.

  Beyond him, a gleaming toy on the tarmac, was the T-38 itself. The trainer was an intimidating white dart. The wings were just little stubs, incredibly short, and the sleek white shape had more of the feel of a rocket about it. It seemed incredible, against intuition, that such a small, compact machine could support itself in the air and fly.

  You’re getting down to the wire, Natalie. You say you want to be an astronaut. You mock the hero pilot tendency. That’s fine.

  But it means you have to cope with experiences like this.

  Two techs helped her climb up and lower herself into the cockpit. The T-38’s white-painted walls were only just wide enough for her to squeeze in. She would actually be in a separate cockpit behind Stone’s, under her own little bubble of glass.

  Stone clambered aboard, in front of her, and spoke over the intercom. ‘Natalie, can you hear me?’

  ‘Sure, Phil. Loud and clear. And I –’

  He cut her off. ‘Final safety instructions,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when to close your canopy bubble. Do it slowly, Natalie. Now, your parachute is set to open as soon as you eject. That’s appropriate for low altitude. Later I’ll tell you when to change the setting to high altitude, when you need to have a delay between ejection and the chute opening; you do that by fastening the hook to that ring on your ‘chute, and …’

  And the noise of the jets rose to a roar, drowning out his words.

  The plane started to taxi.

  Stone, sitting in his bubble ahead of her, looked out calmly, his motions deft and precise. The controls before her moved in sympathy with Stone’s, working themselves like a high-tech pianola.

  She felt her pulse rate rising, her breathing deepening, and the rubber stink of her oxygen mask grew sharper; she felt sweat pool under her goggles, on her squeezed-up cheeks.

  She consoled herself that she was going on a ride which few people would experience: high, fast, probably extraordinarily beautiful. Even if she left the corps tomorrow, she would have this to take away from here.

  Yes, but I’m pretty sure I could get by without it …

  Without warning, the plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat. Within a few seconds she could feel the wheels leaving the ground.

  The plane pitched upwards steeply, and she lost sight of the ground.

  There was a layer of cloud above, lumpy cumulus. The clouds seemed to explode at her, and she shot into white mist. She was through it in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

  She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a patchwork of faded brown with the gray shadows of clouds scattered over it.

  The T-38 rose almost vertically, like a rocket. In a few seconds, the sky faded down to a deep purple.

  The surface of Earth was remote, small, the works of humanity already reduced to two-dimensional splashes of color. It astonished her to think, given the facility with which she had leapt from the ground, that just a century ago no human on the planet had undergone such an experience.

  Scientist-astronauts no longer had to slog through the hell of flight school. But they still needed to go through dynamic situations: to gain experience of microgravity and acceleration, to recognize the symptoms of airsickness and hypoxia. So, the price the scientist-astronauts had to pay was regular hours of flying backseat in a Northrup T-38, the most advanced jet trainer.

  Experienced astronauts were encouraged to take up the rookie scientists. And once you were up there, they could do whatever the hell they liked with you.

  But she trusted Stone. She appreciated the fact that he was taking time out of his own Moonlab-Soyuz training for this piece of nursemaiding.

  ‘How about that,’ Stone said now. ‘Forty-eight thousand feet. Higher than you’ve ever flown before, Natalie.’

  So high she was already in the stratosphere, higher than the tallest mountain, so high she couldn’t breathe unaided. The edge of space, right? Welcome to your new home, space girl.

  ‘Okay,’ Stone said now. ‘Let’s start gently. We’ll slow her down. Can you read the airspeed?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Follow what I do.’

  When the jet got to under two hundred miles an hour, it bucked and juddered, as if the air had become a medium of invisible lumps.

  ‘She doesn’t like being reined in,’ Stone said. ‘So –’

  He opened up the throttle and the plane surged forward. Sunlight gleamed from the carapace around York, and the Earth curved away beneath her, brilliantly lit.

  ‘Slow roll,’ Stone said now.

  The Earth started to tilt, sideways. It wasn’t as if she was rolling at all; York felt only a slight increase in the acceleration pushing her into her seat.

  The horizon arced around her, tipping up, and the bruised purple of the stratosphere slid beneath the belly of the plane.

  Then the plane righted itself, sharply. The roll had taken maybe fifteen seconds.

  ‘Snap roll,’ Stone said.

  This time the plane twisted over in a second, land and sky and sun rolling around, the light strobing across her lap and hands. Her stomach resisted the roll as if she was suddenly filled with mercury.

  After one and a half turns the plane finished upside down. When she looked up, she could see the Gulf of Mexico, set out like a huge map painted across a misty ceiling. Gravity plucked at her – one negative G – and her shoulders strained against the seat harnesses, and her helmeted head bumped against the canopy. The blood pooled in her head, making her feel stuffy, as if she were developing a cold.

  ‘
Just like the tilt table, huh, Natalie,’ Stone said dryly.

  He snapped the plane through a fast half-roll, righting it; the plane settled onto the level, rocking slightly in the air.

  For a second they were still. Stone’s precision and control were remarkable, York thought –

  And then Stone threw the plane down on a dipping curve, diving down toward the remote ground; the noise of the jets increased.

  ‘Parabolic curve,’ Stone called over the jet noise.

  So I should be weightless. She relaxed her arm, and watched her hand drift upwards. ‘My God.’ She felt the weightlessness in her gut; it was as if her organs were climbing upwards, inside her chest cavity.

  ‘You feeling queasy?’

  ‘A little.’ She reached down, checking she could reach the bag in the pocket on her flight suit leg.

  Stone made no signs of taking the plane out of its dive. ‘Ah, you’ll be fine. If it gets too bad, just watch the instrument panel; don’t look out of the window.’

  ‘Okay, but –’

  Her sentence fell apart as Stone threw the plane into a ferocious S-shaped curve. She was turned every which way, and the glowing landscape wheeled around the canopy.

  And then he took the plane into a straight dive, accelerating at the Gulf of Mexico. The ocean shone like a steel plate, far in front of her face.

  At twenty thousand feet Stone hauled the nose of the plane upwards. The jets howled, and the Gs shoved her hard into her seat; her head was pushed into her shoulders, and her vision tunneled, walled by darkness.

  The T-38 leapt back up to the sky, and the light reverted to its deep purple.

  She tasted saliva at the back of her throat, sharp, like rusty iron. ‘Phil, I don’t feel so good.’

  ‘If you have to barf, take off your oxygen mask.’

  I would if I knew how.

  ‘And turn the mix in your mask to a hundred per cent oh-two,’ he said. ‘Turn on your cold air blower.’

  When she tried that, taking deep breaths of the oxygen, the pressure on her throat lessened.