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 Czech beer.
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 for 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 U.S., 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; what the hell was there to steal? Besides, Carter and Ted Kennedy were putting a lot of muscle behind this trip; 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 for 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, straightaway, 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 totaling seventy-one thousand schoolchildren. Each name had to be backed up by a classroom project. The judging criteria were 80 percent for the quality and creativity of the project, and 20 percent 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 short list 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 gotten this flight at all. We’ve heard your public pronouncements. We know you were pissed at the cancellation 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 that 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
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 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 I-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 carny ride,” he said.