by Ben Bova
“Wait!” Stoner yelped. “If we don’t link up with the tanker we can’t complete the mission!”
“If we do link with tanker—boom!”
Stoner sagged inside his restraining harness. “I don’t believe it. How could…?”
A flash caught his eye and they both craned toward the observation ports. In total silence the tanker blew apart, a trio of small flashes followed quicker than an eye-blink by an enormous fireball that nearly blinded them.
Stoner squeezed his eyes shut. Federenko growled something too low for Stoner to catch.
The fireball faded into darkness, leaving a burning afterimage against Stoner’s eyes. There was no shock wave, no noise, no debris pattering around them. It was as if they had been watching a silent picture. Stoner couldn’t believe it was real.
“Gone,” Federenko said heavily.
Stoner rubbed at his eyes, then looked out through the port again. Nothing but the unutterably distant stars.
“Gone,” he admitted. “And where does that leave us?”
“We are dead men, Shtoner. Without propellants from tanker, we cannot get back to Earth.”
It took a few moments for the realization to sink in. Finally Stoner heard himself say, “But we have enough fuel to make the rendezvous with the alien, don’t we?”
Federenko gave him a long, solemn look. “Da,” he said at last. “Plenty maneuvering fuel now.”
“Then let’s do it!” Stoner said. “That’s what we came out here for, isn’t it? Let’s do it!”
Federenko’s bearded face almost smiled. “I knew you would say that, Shtoner.”
“What else is there?” Stoner asked, feeling strangely excited. “Let’s go!”
* * *
JOHNSON SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
“Hey, it’s quittin’ time, man!”
Hank Garvey planted his ponderous bulk on the computer analyst’s desk and leaned toward the skinny youngster.
“We got an emergency on our hands, boy,” Garvey said, his voice murderously calm and deep, like the throaty warning cough of a lion.
“The next shift…”
“Uncle Sam wants yew,” said Garvey. “Yer the best goddam’ computer jockey in the Center. I know, ’cause I’ve had to lissen to yew tellin’ me ’bout it a thousand times or two. Now yer gonna prove it.”
“But my ol’lady…”
Garvey laid a hand the size of a football on the analyst’s bony shoulder. “Our man Stoner and his Rooskie pilot are in trouble. Their tanker blew up on ’em.”
“Jeezus!”
“They ain’t hurt. Their spacecraft’s intact, no damage. But they can’t get back home—not unless some damn smart boy comes up with a new flight plan for ’em—damn fast.”
“Holy shit!” the computer analyst said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Okay, okay, get your fat ass off my desk an’ lemme get to work.”
Garvey grinned like a Poppa Bear. “That’s mah boy.”
* * *
CHAPTER 43
The communications center on Kwajalein was in an uproar. Even the technicians at their consoles were yelling at one another in confusion.
Jeff Thompson, standing beside Ramsey McDermott’s chair, was hollering into the old man’s ear, “We can’t let them go on! The farther out they go toward the alien, the more impossible it’ll be to get them back!”
McDermott’s jowls sagged. He had lost ten pounds and aged a decade in the months since he’d first seen the aurora mocking him. His shirt collar gaped around his wizened neck. His hands shook uncertainly. His eyes had lost their fire.
Edouard Reynaud, his arm no longer in its sling, gripped Thompson’s arm. “You must call them back. You must make them come back!”
“Can’t…” McDermott croaked.
“But they can retrofire into a lunar orbit,” Reynaud insisted. “I have the numbers in my head. They should have enough fuel for that.”
Thompson brightened. “Right! If they can get themselves back into an orbit around the Moon we might be able to send something up there to ferry them back to Earth.”
But McDermott shook his head weakly. “Stoner won’t listen…”
“QUIET!” an amplified boice roared.
Everything stopped. People froze where they were. The room went silent, except for the electrical hum of the communications consoles and the buzz of the air conditioners.
Lieutenant Commander Tuttle was standing on a desktop, microphone in hand. He gazed around the room and, satisfied that all attention was on him, let the hand holding the mike drop to his side.
“This is a Navy project,” he said, voice sharp and loud enough to be heard across the stilled room. “And I am the Navy officer in charge.”
Thompson stared at the little lieutenant commander. For the first time since he’d met the man, Tuttle was making his uniform look good.
“The goal of this project is to make contact with that alien spacecraft. Stoner and the Russian are on their way to do just that. So you will all get back to your jobs and stop the yakking.”
“But they won’t be able to return to Earth!” Reynaud shouted, his chubby face going red with either anger or embarrassment, or perhaps both.
“That’s a problem that we’ll have to tackle,” Tuttle snapped. “Stoner is aware of it. He’s the only one of you who’s kept his head. If he’s willing to risk his life to make contact with the alien, the least we can do is see to it that whatever he discovers is received here and properly recorded so that the whole human race can study it. Now get to work!”
They moved. Numbly, sullenly, with grumbles and whispers they turned back to their jobs.
Reynaud, trembling in his perspiration-soaked white shirt, glared across the big room at Tuttle as the Navy officer climbed down from the desk. For the first time in many years, Reynaud knew real anger. He also knew that Tuttle was right.
“There it is!” Stoner shouted. “I can see it!”
Federenko took his eyes from the radar screen and leaned across to look through Stoner’s observation port.
“It glows,” he whispered.
They had come up on the alien craft with the Sun at their backs. The radar image had been fuzzy, almost nebulous, at the longer wavelengths. But when Stoner turned on the microwave radar the image cleared up and showed a smaller but much sharper blip.
Now he saw the spacecraft itself.
It glowed with a strange, eerie, golden light, like a shimmering aura that surrounded the solid craft. The spacecraft was imbedded in the glowing light. From this distance it was still too far away to make out details, but it appeared to be roughly oblong in shape, with a smooth surface and rounded corners.
“No wonder it looked like a comet to the ground radars,” Stoner realized.
“What is the light?” Federenko asked.
“A screen of some kind?” Stoner guessed. “A screen of energy like a magnetic field, maybe. To protect it against cosmic radiation. Maybe a shield against micrometeors, too.”
They were closing fast on it. Stoner floated out of his seat and wormed his way back to the orbital module of the Soyuz. Taking the stubby, compact telescope from its clips on the equipment rack, he focused on the alien ship through the nearest observation port.
“If it’s come all this way from another solar system it must have been in space for hundreds of thousands of years, at least,” he called, loudly enough for Federenko to hear him on the other side of the open hatch. “But its surface looks smooth and clean. No meteoric erosion. No pitting.”
“What is color?”
Squinting through the telescope, Stoner said, “Hard to say. The light around it makes everything look kind of golden.”
“Are cameras recording?”
Stoner glanced at the equipment monitor panel. The camera lights were on. So were the video transmitter lights. “Yes,” he called.
Stoner watched for what seemed like an hour as they glided closer to the spacecraft’s surface and Fed
erenko spoke to ground control. The spacecraft’s surface was absolutely featureless, and as smooth as the skin of a supersonic aircraft. Not a rivet, not a seam, not even a line of decoration.
Then he realized that they were not getting any closer. Leaving the telescope hanging weightlessly, he ducked halfway through the connecting hatch.
“You can get us a lot closer, Nikolai. It won’t bite us.”
“No closer,” Federenko said firmly.
“Come on, we…”
“Orders from ground control. They are working on new course for us, get us back to Earth.”
“Terrific. But in the meantime we’re here!”
“Not to use maneuvering fuel,” Federenko said. “Take photographs, describe spacecraft for radio and tapes.”
“But we can rendezvous with the thing!” Stoner insisted. “For Chrissake, it’s only a stone’s throw away!”
“Too long a throw. You are Olympic champion, maybe?”
“Come on, Nikolai!”
“Must not use maneuvering fuel,” the cosmonaut replied stubbornly. “Orders. Our lives depend on this.”
Stoner pulled back into the ovoid orbital module and peered out the observation port at the alien craft. It was close enough now to make out clearly with the naked eye. It hovered against the stars, tantalizingly near, its golden energy screen glowing, pulsating slowly, like the deep eternal breath of God.
They seemed to be at rest now compared to the alien vehicle. They rode alongside, about a hundred meters off its flank, riding silently against the stars, close enough to touch, too far away to touch. Stoner knew that their placid, seemingly motionless encounter was an illusion. Both craft were hurtling away from Earth, flying farther from safety each second. The alien was heading out of the solar system, back into the the unthinkable gulf between the stars, and unless they broke away and took up a new trajectory, Stoner knew that he and Federenko would also leave Earth’s grip forever.
He stared hard at the alien spacecraft, knowing that a million miles away, men and women were working frantically to find a way to bring them back home safely.
“Fuck it,” Stoner muttered. He reached for his pressure suit, hanging limp and lifeless on the opposite wall of the orbital module.
“What you do, Shtoner?” Federenko called from the command module.
“I’m going out,” Stoner said, yanking on the pressure suit leggings. It was no simple matter in zero gravity. “I’ll use the backpack maneuvering jets to get to it.”
“Not enough fuel in backpack. Alien is too far away.”
“Nudge us a little closer, then. Close enough for me to reach it.”
“No.”
“You’ve got to, Nikolai!”
Federenko appeared at the hatch, his dark face set in a solemn frown. “I want to save our lives, not kill us foolishly.”
The exertion of wriggling halfway into the pressure suit made Stoner bob weightlessly across the orbital module. He put a hand against the ceiling to steady himself; his feet dangled inches from the floor.
“Sit down, Shtoner,” Federenko said. “Calm yourself.”
“Listen. I could take both backpacks—yours and mine. One to ride me out there, the other to get me back.”
“Foolishness.”
“But it’d work!” he said. “There’s enough fuel in the two of them to make it okay, isn’t there?”
Federenko turned away from him.
“Isn’t there?” Stoner grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Yes,” said the cosmonaut. “But I forbid it.”
Stoner went back to struggling into the pressure suit.
“Shtoner, I am in command.”
“And I’m a third-degree black belt,” he said, reaching down for his boots. “Are you going to help me or do we fight?”
“You will kill yourself.”
“Nikolai, if we get back to Earth I’ll have to live with myself. Do you think I could, knowing that we got this close and didn’t go the rest of the way? That sonofabitch has traveled light-years to reach us! The least I can do is cover the last hundred meters to meet him.”
Federenko said nothing. He solemnly watched as Stoner pulled on his boots and began zipping up the suit.
“Well, are you going to help me or are you going to just stand there and sulk?” Stoner taunted.
Scowling, Federenko pulled his own backpack from its rack and started adjusting its shoulder straps.
“You are killing me also,” he said. But he helped Stoner into the backpack.
The television screens at the front of the control center showed the alien spacecraft glowing against the star-flecked heavens. For long minutes now the Soyuz radio had been silent.
Jo sat at her computer console, every nerve tingling, stretched taut with tension, a headphone clamped over her glistening black hair.
“Go ahead, Houston,” she said into the lip microphone. “I can hear you clearly.”
Markov stood tensely behind her, and beside him Zworkin hovered like a protective mother hen. Uniformed security police armed with machine pistols stood a few yards off. Other men, bulky, hunch-shouldered, scowling men in dark suits prowled all through the huge command center, eying everyone suspiciously.
Jo watched her computer screen fill with data: numbers and symbols flashing across the tiny screen faster than any human eye could follow. She glanced up at the smaller wall screens flanking the main picture of the alien spacecraft. A new booster was being fueled hurriedly out on one of Tyuratam’s eighty working launch pads. A new tanker to be launched into a high-acceleration rescue trajectory. The Americans, with their faster and smarter computers, were working out the flight plan that would get the tanker to the Soyuz in time to save Federenko and Stoner. Jo had become the liaison link between Texas and Tyuratam.
The command center was astir with quiet, organized frenzy. Computers and humans were working their hardest. Markov gazed around the vast room and saw the security police, their steely eyes constantly moving, their hands never far from the guns they carried.
As if shooting up the place would help, he said to himself.
Zworkin had spent an hour on the phone with Bulacheff in Moscow. Great upheavals were taking place. Maria had been called off for questioning by her superiors. She’ll either be made a Hero of the Soviet Union for foiling the saboteurs or we’ll both end our days in prison, Markov knew. It all depends on who wins what in the Kremlin.
“Very good, Houston,” Jo said into her microphone. “The data’s coming through. Thank you.”
She yanked the headset off and let it clunk on the console’s desktop, then leaned back in her chair.
“They’ve got the big NASA computers working out the high-energy trajectory,” Jo said.
“Will that be enough?” Markov wondered. “Can they get the new tanker into position for them?”
Jo looked up at him, her dark eyes shadowed with fatigue and fear. “If they can’t, no one can.”
“What if ground command send up new orders, a new flight path that will get us back?” Federenko grumbled as he checked out Stoner’s suit. “You will be out there…”
“I’ll be in touch over the suit radio,” Stoner said.
“Da. And when I say to come back, you will say, ‘Not yet. One more photograph.’ ”
Stoner chuckled. Satisfied that the suit was sealed, Federenko handed him the helmet. Stoner pulled it on, locked it in place, slid down the visor and sealed it.
“I’ll come back when you tell me they’ve got us a new trajectory that’ll get us home,” Stoner said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.
Federenko looked unconvinced. He held up one finger, then squeezed back through the hatch into the command module and swung the hatch shut.
Stoner was alone now.
“Radio check,” the cosmonaut’s voice rumbled in his earphones. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Very good.”
Stoner glided over to the controls
that pumped the air out of the orbital module. Nikolai’s giving me his backpack for this, he thought. If his rescue depends on going EVA, he’s just thrown his life away.
“Shtoner.”
“Yes?”
“Good luck, Shtoner.”
“Thanks, Nikolai. I appreciate…everything you’ve done.”
“Say hello to alien for me.”
Stoner laughed. “I will.”
He cycled the air out of the ovoid chamber and opened the outer hatch. Pushing the extra backpack out ahead of him, Stoner stepped out into nothingness. He drifted free of the Soyuz, then turned and surveyed the situation.
The Earth was far away. No longer a huge smear of awesome girth, it was now a crescent of blue and white hanging in the star-scattered dark. Stoner put out a gloved hand and covered the planet of his birth with an upraised thumb.
He could see the Moon, too, a smaller crescent. The Sun’s fierce blaze was over his left shoulder; he had no intention of looking in that direction, but he could see at the corner of his vision the glowing disk of the Sun’s zodiacal light: cosmic dust, rubble and debris left over from the formation of the planets, eons ago.
A slight soundless puff from the thrusters at his waist and he squarely faced the alien spacecraft. It floated serene and aloof inside its golden, pulsing aura of energy.
Slowly, tugging the spare backpack on its tether, Stoner approached the alien spacecraft.
“Nikolai, do you suppose that energy screen could do damage to a slow-moving object, like an astronaut?”
“Could be,” Federenko’s voice responded. “Keep talking…everything is relayed to Tyuratam automatically.”
“Okay.”
Describing what he was doing as he did it, Stoner pulled up the tether that held the extra backpack, reeled it up until the pack was in his grasp, then pushed it out ahead of him. The effort slowed his approach to the alien spacecraft as the backpack sailed out ahead of him, the long tether gradually, slowly unwinding.
“The tether’s insulated,” he said. “If the screen causes an electrical discharge it won’t run back up the line and zap me. I hope.”
