“He’s back! The American!”
This time Sam did not pretend to need an emergency rescue. He had flown an orbital transfer vehicle to our station and matched orbit. His OTV was hovering a few hundred meters alongside us.
“Permission to come aboard?” His voice was unmistakable. “Unofficially?”
I glanced at Zworkin, who was of course right beside me in the command center. Strangely, Nikolai Nikolaivich nodded. Nothing is unofficial with him, I knew. Yet he did not object to the American making an “unofficial” visit.
I went to the docking chamber while Sam floated over to us. The airlock of his craft would not fit our docking mechanism, so he went EVA in his pressure suit and jetted across to us using his backpack maneuvering unit.
“I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d drop by for a minute,” Sam wisecracked once he got through our airlock and slid up the visor of his helmet.
“Why are you in this area?” Zworkin asked, eyes slitted in his pimpled face.
“To observe your laser tests,” replied Sam, grinning. “You guys don’t think our intelligence people don’t know what you’re up to, do you?”
“We are not testing lasers!”
“Not today, I know. Don’t worry about it, Ivan, I’m not spying on you, for chrissakes.”
“My name is not Ivan!”
“I just came over to thank you guys for saving my ass.” Sam turned slightly, his entire body pivoting weightlessly toward me. He reached into the pouches on the legs of his suit. “A couple of small tokens of my gratitude.”
He pulled out two small plastic jewel cases and handed them to me. Videodiscs.
“Latest Hollywood releases,” Sam explained. “With my thanks.”
In a few minutes he was gone. Zworkin insisted on looking at the videos before anyone else could see them. “Probably capitalist propaganda,” he grumbled.
I insisted on seeing them with him. I was not going to let him keep them all for himself.
One of the videos was the very popular film, Rocky XVIII, in which the geriatric former prizefighter is rejuvenated and gets out of his wheelchair to defeat a nine-foot-tall robot for the heavyweight championship of the solar system.
“Disgusting,” spat Zworkin.
“But it will be good to show the crew how low the capitalists sink in their pursuit of money,” I said.
He gave me a sour look but did not argue.
The second video was a rock musical that featured decadent music at extreme decibel levels, decadent youths wearing outlandish clothes and weird hairdos, and decadent young women wearing hardly any clothes at all. Their gyrations were especially disturbing, no matter from which point of view you looked at them.
“Definitely not for the crew to see,” said Zworkin. None of us ever saw that video again. He kept it. But now and then I heard the music, faintly, from his private cubicle during the shifts when he was supposed to be sleeping. Mysteriously, his acne began to clear up.
Almost two weeks afterward Sam popped up again. Again he asked permission to come aboard, claiming this time he was on a routine inspection mission of a commsat in geosynchronous orbit and had planned his return to the NASA station to take him close to us. He was a remarkable pilot, that much I must admit.
“Got a couple more videos for you,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
Zworkin immediately okayed his visit. The rest of my crew, who had cheered the rejuvenated Rocky in his proletarian struggle against the stainless-steel symbol of western imperialism (as we saw it), welcomed him aboard.
Sam stayed for a couple of hours. We fed him a meal of borscht, soysteak and ice cream. With plenty of hot tea.
“That’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had!” Sam told me as we made our weightless way from the galley back to the docking chamber, where he had left his pressure suit.
“We get fresh supplies every week,” I said. “Our only luxury.”
“I never knew you guys had such great ice cream.” He was really marveling over it.
“Moscow is famous for its ice cream,” I replied.
With a shake of his head that made his whole body sway slightly, Sam admitted, “Boy, we got nothing like that back at the NASA station.”
“Would you like to bring some back to your station?” I asked. Innocent fool that I am, I did not realize that he had maneuvered me into making the offer.
“Gee, yeah,” he said, like a little boy.
I had one of the men pack him a container of ice cream while he struggled into his pressure suit. Zworkin was off screening the two new videos Sam had brought, so I did not bother him with the political question of offering a gift in return for Sam’s gift.
As he put his helmet over his head, Sam said to me in a low voice, “Each of those videos is a double feature.”
“A what?”
Leaning close to me, so that the technician in charge of the docking airlock could not hear, he whispered, “Play the disks at half speed and you’ll see another whole video. But you look at them yourself first. Don’t let that sourball of a political officer see it or he’ll confiscate them both.”
I felt puzzled, and my face must have shown it. Sam merely grinned, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Thanks for the ice cream.”
Then he left.
It took a bit of ingenuity to figure out how to play the disks at half speed. It took even more cleverness to arrange to look at them in private, without Zworkin or any of the other crew members hanging over my shoulders. But I did it.
The “second feature” on each of the tapes was pornographic filth. Disgusting sexual acrobatics featuring beautiful women with large breasts and apparently insatiable appetites. I watched the degrading spectacles several times, despite stern warnings from my conscience. If I had been cursed with acne these videos would undoubtedly have solved the problem overnight. Especially the one with the trapeze.
For the first time since I had been a teenager buying contraband blue jeans I faced a moral dilemma. Should I tell Zworkin about these secret pornographic films? He had seen only the normal, “regular” features on each tape: an ancient John Wayne western and a brand-new comedy about a computer that takes over Wall Street.
In my own defense I say only that I was thinking of the good of my crew when I made my decision. The men had been in orbit for nearly 650 days with almost two full months to go before we could return to our loved ones. The pornographic films might help them to bear their loneliness and perform better at their tasks, I reasoned.
But only if Zworkin did not know about them.
I decided to chance it. One by one I let the crew in on the little secret.
Morale improved six hundred percent. Performance and productivity rose equally. The men smiled and laughed a lot more. I told myself it was just as much because they were pulling one over on the puritanical Zworkin as because they were watching the buxom Oral Roberta and her insatiable girlfriend Electric (AC/DC) Edna.
Sam returned twice more, swapping videos for ice cream. He was our friend. He apparently had an inexhaustible supply of videos, each of them a “double feature.” While Zworkin spent the next several weeks happily watching the regular features on each disk and perspiring every time he saw a girl in a bikini, the rest of watched the erotic adventures of airline stewardesses, movie starlets, models, housewife-hookers, and other assorted and sordid specimens of female depravity.
The days flew by with each man counting the hours until Sam showed up with another few videos. We stopped eating ice cream so that we would have plenty to give him in return.
Then Sam sprang his trap on us. On me.
“Listen,” he said as he was suiting up in the docking chamber, preparing to leave, “next time, how about sticking a couple of those diamonds you’re making into the ice cream.”