"Are you well, Colonel?" The Plumber loaded the tape and punched up a lexicon program with deft, calloused fingers. "You look as though you just ate a bug. I want you to hear this."
Korolev watched uneasily as the tape flickered into an ad for baseball gloves. The lexicon's Cyrillic subtitles raced across the monitor as a Japanese voice-over rattled maniacally.
"The newscast's coming up," said the Plumber, gnawing at a cuticle.
Korolev squinted anxiously as the translation slid across the face of the Japanese announcer:
AMERICAN DISARMAMENT GROUP CLAIMS ... PREPARATIONS AT BAIKONUR COSMODROME ... PROVE RUSSIANS AT LAST READY ... TO SCRAP ARMED SPACE STATION COMIC CITY ...
"Cosmic," the Plumber muttered. "Glitch in the lexicon."
BUILT AT TURN OF CENTURY AS BRIDGEHEAD TO SPACE ... AMBITIOUS PROJECT CRIPPLED BY FAILURE OF LUNAR MINING ... EXPENSIVE STATION OUTPERFORMED BY OUR UNMANNED ORBITAL FACTORIES ... CRYSTALS SEMICONDUCTORS AND PURE DRUGS ...
"Smug bastards." The Plumber snorted. "I tell you, it's that goddamned KGB man Yefremov. He's had a hand in this!"
STAGGERING SOVIET TRADE DEFICITS ... POPULAR DISCONTENT WITH SPACE EFFORT ... RECENT DECISIONS BY
POLITBURO AND CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETARIAT ...
"They're shutting us down!" The Plumber's face contorted with rage.
Korolev twisted away from the screen, shaking uncontrollably. Sudden tears peeled from his lashes in free-fall droplets. "Leave me alone! I can do nothing!"
"What's wrong, Colonel?" The Plumber grabbed his shoulders. "Look me in the face. Someone's dosed you with the Fear!"
"Go away," Korolev begged.
"That little spook bastard! What has he given you? Pills? An injection?"
Korolev shuddered. "I had a drink-"
"He gave you the Fear! You, a sick old man! I'll break his face!" The Plumber jerked his knees up, somersaulted backward, kicked off from a handhold overhead, and catapulted out of the room.
"Wait! Plumber!" But the Plumber had zipped through the docking sphere like a squirrel, vanishing down the corridor, and now Korolev felt that he couldn't bear to be alone. In the distance, he could hear metallic echoes of distorted, angry shouts.
Trembling, he closed his eyes and waited for someone to help him.
He'd asked Psychiatric Officer Bychkov to help him dress in his old uniform, the one with the Star of the Tsiolkovsky Order sewn above the left breast pocket. The black dress boots of heavy quilted nylon, with their Velcro soles, would no longer fit his twisted feet; so his feet remained bare.
Bychkov's injection had straightened him out within an hour, leaving him alternately depressed and furiously angry. Now he waited in the museum for Yefremov to answer his summons.
They called his home the Museum of the Soviet Triumph in Space, and as his rage subsided, to be replaced with an ancient bleakness, he felt very much as if he were simply another one of the exhibits. He stared gloomily at the gold-framed portraits of the great visionaries of space, at the faces of Tsiolkovsky, Rynin, Tupolev. Below these, in slightly smaller frames, were portraits of Verne, Goddard, and O'Neill.
In moments of extreme depression he had sometimes imagined that he could detect a common strangeness in their eyes, particularly in the eyes of the two Americans. Was it simply craziness, as he sometimes thought in his most cynical moods? Or was he able to glimpse a subtle manifestation of some weird, unbalanced force that he had often suspected of being human evolution in action?
Once, and only once, Korolev had seen that look in his own eyes-on the day he'd stepped onto the soil of the Coprates Basin. The Martian sunlight, glinting within his helmet visor, had shown him the reflection of two steady, alien eyes-fearless, yet driven-and the quiet, secret shock of it, he now realized, had been his life's most memorable, most transcendental moment.
Above the portraits, oily and inert, was a painting that depicted the landing in colors that reminded him of borscht and gravy, the Martian landscape reduced to the idealistic kitsch of Soviet Socialist realism. The artist had posed the suited figure beside the lander with all of the official style's deeply sincere vulgarity.
Feeling tainted, he awaited the arrival of Yefremov, the KGB man, Kosmograd's Political Officer.
When Yefremov finally entered the Salyut, Korolev noted the split lip and the fresh bruises on the man's throat. He wore a blue Kansai jump suit of Japanese silk and stylish Italian deck shoes. He coughed politely. "Good morning, Comrade Colonel."
Korolev stared. He allowed the silence to lengthen. "Yefremov," he said heavily, "I am not happy with you."
Yefremov reddened, but he held his gaze. "Let us speak frankly to each other, Colonel, as Russian to Russian. It was not, of course, intended for you."
"The Fear, Yefremov?"
"The beta-carboline, yes. I you hadn't pandered to their antisocial actions, if you hadn't accepted their bribe, it would not have happened."
"So I am a pimp, Yefremov? A pimp and a drunkard? You are a cuckold, a smuggler, and an informer. I say this," he added, "as one Russian to another."
Now the KGB man's face assumed the official mask of bland and untroubled righteousness.
"But tell me, Yefremov, what it is that you are really about. What have you been doing since you came to Kosmograd? We know that the complex will be stripped. What is in store for the civilian crew when they return to Baikonur? Corruption hearings?"
"There will be interrogation, certainly. In certain cases there may be hospitalization. Would you care to suggest, Colonel Korolev, that the Soviet Union is somehow at fault for Kosmograd's failures?"
Korolev was silent.
"Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. Moscow is the greatest power in history. We must not allow ourselves to lose the global perspective."
"Do you think we can be brushed aside that easily? We are an elite, a highly trained technical elite."
"A minority, Colonel, an obsolete minority. What do you contribute, aside from reams of poisonous American trash? The crew here were intended to be workers, not bloated black marketeers trafficking in jazz and pornography." Yefremov's face was smooth and calm. "The crew will return to Baikonur. The weapons are capable of being directed from the ground. You, of course, will remain, and there will be guest cosmonauts: Africans, South Americans. Space still retains a degree of its former prestige for these people."
Korolev gritted his teeth. "What have you done with the boy?"
"Your Plumber?" The Political Officer frowned. "He has assaulted an officer of the Committee for State Security. He will remain under guard until he can be taken to Baikonur."
Korolev attempted an unpleasant laugh. "Let him go. You'll be in too much trouble yourself to press charges. I'll speak with Marshal Gubarev personally. My rank may be entirely honorary, Yefremov, but I do retain a certain influence."
The KGB man shrugged. "The gun crew are under orders from Baikonur to keep the communicators module under lock and key. Their careers depend on it."
"Martial law, then?"
"This isn't Kabul, Colonel. These are difficult times. You have the moral authority here; you should try to set an example."
"We shall see," Korolev said.
Kosmograd swung out of Earth's shadow into raw sunlight. The walls of Korolev's Salyut popped and creaked like a nest of glass bottles. A Salyut's viewports, Korolev thought absently, fingering the broken veins at his temple, were always the first things to go.
Young Grishkin seemed to have the same thought. He drew a tube of caulk from an ankle-pocket and began to inspect the seal around the viewport. He was the Plumber's assistant and closest friend.
"We must now vote," Korolev said wearily. Eleven of Kosmograd's twenty-four civilian crew members had agreed to attend the meeting, twelve if he counted himself. That left thirteen who were either unwilling to risk involvement or else actively hostile to the idea of a strike. Yefremov and the six-man gun crew brought the total number of those not present to twenty. "We've discussed our demands. All those in favor of the list as it stands-" He raised his good hand. Three others raised theirs. Grishkin, busy at the viewport, stuck out his foot.