All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once she started to see the system behind the diagrams, she began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.
Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, she worked her way through her manuals, learning how the spaceship was flown.
Monday, June 11, 1979
The convoy of buses skirted around Moscow, following the freeways. They were heading northeast, toward Kaliningrad. There was a lot of traffic, most of it freight, and the road was lined with apartment blocks, huge, drab monoliths.
Joe Muldoon stared out of a grimy window. It was the most depressing sight he had ever seen.
Here they were, hauling ass direct from the airport, straight out of the city to Starry Town. This was Muldoon’s second visit. Their first trip out had been better. Then, the American crew — Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone, with the NASA technical people and program managers — had stayed in an Intourist hotel. It was no palace, but it was right in the middle of downtown Moscow, with Red Square and the Kremlin a walk away. Every morning the Soviets had arrived with buses to take the Americans out to Starry Town, and every evening they’d brought them back.
And the hotel had had a bar in the basement.
That bar had proved to be a magnet for foreign nationals, one of the few congenial places in the city. There were other Americans to be found there, and Germans, Cubans, Czechs. Muldoon and the NASA guys had made that bar their own.
There’d been no harm done, save for a few late nights and bleary mornings. But in retrospect, he could see the problem for the program managers. Not to mention the Soviets. In that bar, they are out of control, those Americanskis!
So this time out, things were arranged differently.
At Kaliningrad the convoy turned east toward Shchelkovo. The architecture changed. There were wooden houses, along both sides of the road; unlike the Soviet-style apartments closer to Moscow, these were painted brightly and decorated with ornate wood carvings. Muldoon could smell woodsmoke. And every few hundred yards there were hand pumps.
It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.
The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings there, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.
Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.
This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.
The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.
Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to him, anywhere, even though he’d gone so much farther than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.
His apartment was huge. More like a suite. He wandered through the rooms. The place was crammed with furniture, all of it heavy and old-fashioned: sofas, overstuffed chairs, heavy tables. There was a thick shag pile on the floor, and flocked paper on every inch of wall. He found the bathroom, and there he had to laugh. There was no soap, and there were no plugs for the bath or sink, and only one towel.
And probably a bug in every damn light fixture.
He glanced out of the window. He saw white pines, barbed wire. A black limousine cruised along one of the central access roads: probably KGB, Muldoon thought. Home away from home. Like a fucking prison camp.
He jammed a washcloth in the plug hole and ran a bath.
He dressed in his dinner suit and went down to the bar.
It wasn’t much like the Intourist place in Moscow. But there was a barman, polishing glasses; he had a thin, Asiatic face. Muldoon asked for a beer. It proved to be cold; it was a Czech brand, and it tasted good. There was nobody else there. Some kind of god-awful piano music tinkled over a PA.
There was going to be a reception tonight, before a dinner in the place’s dining room, all to celebrate the progress of Moonlab-Soyuz. Fred Michaels himself was supposed to attend, and God alone knew how many Soviet big fish. You’ll have to take it easy, Muldoon Watch what you say. No more hostages to fortune. He knew what to expect at the dinner, though: meat, lots of it, with piles of cream and butter. Deliciously bad for him.
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 copiloted 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 copilot 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 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 his being back on the active roster and returning to the Moon, for God’s sake. And, truth to tell, he wasn’t sure if she’d even be there for him when he got back from this jaunt.