Soyuz came in slowly and hesitantly, with many small attitude and angle corrections. At one point the ship even backed off from Moonlab. The Moonlab crew and Houston kept quiet; Stone listened to the soft, tense, dialogue in Russian between Komarov and Kaliningrad.
Komarov was evidently a pig to fly. Soyuz was a flexible ferry craft, but it was essentially a contemporary of the American Gemini, lacking much of the sophistication and power of Apollo. There was a real lack of precise attitude control and translation instruments, with most of the operations conducted by preprogrammed mission event sequencers.
In fact, the poor maneuverability of Soyuz had caused some friction during the planning stages of this joint flight. Some on the U.S. side had suggested, half-seriously, that Soyuz should be the “passive” partner — that Apollo should haul the bulk of Moonlab into the docking with the tiny Soyuz…
Anyhow it looked as if Soyuz was coming in on its final approach. As it neared, bristling with detail, Komarov arced up and out of Stone’s view, and he heard Muldoon calling out in Russian.
“Five yards… three yards… one…”
There was a soft clang, a rattle of docking latches.
“Well-done, Vlad,” Muldoon called. “Good show, tovarich. You came in at just a foot per second.”
“Indeed. Now Apollo and Soyuz are shaking hands, here in the shadow of the Moon. Yes?”
The cosmonauts moved into the small docking module and sealed it up. They had to sit out there three hours as the pressure was reduced to match Moonlab’s.
Stone pulled himself into the tunnel at the core of the Multiple Docking Adapter, close to the entrance to the Soyuz Docking Module. Muldoon and Bleeker were already there, and the little tunnel, packed with instrument boxes and oxygen bottles, was crowded. Stone’s job was to work the small handheld TV camera and relay handshake pictures back to Earth.
There was a soft tapping. Muldoon opened the hatch.
Vladimir Viktorenko, beaming broadly, reached out and shook Muldoon’s hand. “My friend. I am very happy to see you.” He came tumbling out of the hatch, squat and exuberant, and gave Muldoon a bear hug. He gave Muldoon a little packet of bread and salt, a traditional Russian greeting. Solovyov followed his commander out. And there were the five of them crowded into the docking adapter’s tunnel, grinning and hugging, always with one eye on the camera.
Muldoon led them through the clutter of Moonlab toward the wardroom. Viktorenko and Solovyov made the obligatory polite remarks about the bird, but, Stone thought, they were being kind.
The first task of each new crew up there was to use its Apollo Service Module to tweak Moonlab’s orbit. The Moon’s gravity field was so lumpy that anything left in low lunar orbit would soon fall to the surface. And when he’d first approached ’Lab in Grissom, Stone might have been tempted to let the thing just fall.
After five years Moonlab’s outside hull was pretty much dinged up, with big fist-sized meteorite holes knocked in the shield. The solar cells, also dented by meteorites, had degraded, and so the power was down to half its peak. Inside, the lights were dim, and jerry-built air ducts ran everywhere to make up for the broken fans. Stone was already sick of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.
And the interior was like someone’s utility room — more like a survival shelter than a laboratory, Stone thought — with every surface scuffed and scarred, every piece of equipment patched up, every wall encrusted with junk. Moonlab was an improvised lash-up anyhow, and the place really hadn’t been designed for growth; and every time a crew had gone up with some new experiment or a replacement article it had just bolted the kit to whatever free hydrogen-tank wall space there was, and left it there forever. After five years, the walls were growing inward, as if coated with a metallic coral. Sometimes you couldn’t even find the pieces of kit you needed, and you had to radio down to previous crews to find out where they’d left stuff.
The place was kept hygienic — it had to be — but you wouldn’t call it clean. Hell, you had highly trained pilots and scientists up there. They didn’t want to spend their lives on maintenance, for God’s sake; they had work to do. And the result was unpleasant, sometimes.
Like the black algae that had finally put paid to the shower.
Even the toilets never seemed to vent properly. And the old bird was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep at night. Some long-duration Moonlab crews had gone home with permanent hearing loss, he’d been told.
It was much worse than his first flight out there. It was all a kind of hideous, long-drawn-out consequence of Bert Seger’s original decision to redirect this ’Lab from Earth orbit, back in 1973.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so sniffy about that big tractor out there, the Soyuz. At least the Soviets must feel at home, here, ’Lab’s no worse than a Moscow hotel.
Still, you could see Moonlab as a kind of huge experiment in space endurance. Moonlab was a Type II spacecraft. Type I you’d never repair; you’d use it once and bring it home to discard, or fix on the ground, like Apollo Type II, like the ’Labs, were supposed to be repairable, but with logistic support from nearby Earth. Type III, the ultimate goal, would be able to survive for years without logistic support. Any Mars mission would have to be aboard a Type III spacecraft, a level of maturity beyond Moonlab.
Without the long-duration experience of Moonlab and Skylab, the Mars mission would not be conceivable.
They reached the wardroom, where the plastic table was fixed to the mesh floor, and the crew had rigged up five T-cross seats. They sat at the table, hooking their legs under the bars of the seats, and Stone fixed the TV camera to a strut. Then the performance really began.
There were flags to swap, including a U.N. flag, which had been carried up by Soyuz and would be returned home by Apollo. Each crew had brought along halves of commemorative aluminum and steel medallions, which Muldoon and Viktorenko joined together. They traded boxes of seeds from their countries: the Americans handed over a hybrid white spruce, and the Soviets Scotch pine, Siberian larch, and Nordmann’s fir.
It was time for the ritual meal. The Americans were hosts today, so, from the customary plastic bags, the cosmonauts were treated to potato soup, bread, strawberries, and grilled steak. There was much forced bonhomie and laughter in all this. Tomorrow it would be the Russians’ turn, and — as Stone knew, because they’d practiced even this — the menu would be tins containing fish, meat, and potatoes, tubes of soft cheese, dried soup, vegetable puree, and oats; there would be nuts, black bread, dried fruit.
As he ate, Stone looked dubiously at the TV camera staring at him from above. As space PR stunts went, this one was turning out to be a stinker. Jesus, he thought. I hope nobody I know is tuned in to this.
Viktorenko said, “Of course, as the philosophers say, the best part of a good dinner is not what you eat, but with whom you eat.” He dug out five metal tubes from a pocket of his coverall. The tubes were labeled: “vodka.” The astronauts made dutiful noises of pleasure, and when they opened the tubes up, they found borscht, which they displayed to the camera. A Soviet joke Ha-ha.
With the meal cleared away, the telecast should have been finished, so the crews could relax. But Bob Crippen, capcom for the day, called up from Houston. “Moonlab, we have a surprise for you. Go ahead, Mr. President; you’re linked up to Moonlab.”
Familiar Georgian tones crackled over the air. “Good evening, gentlemen. Or is it morning where you are? I’m speaking to you from the Oval Office at the White House, and this must be the most remarkable telephone call since John Kennedy spoke to you, Joe, and Neil Armstrong on the surface of the Moon, eleven years ago…”