Tyuratam.
It was like the skyline of Manhattan, except that these were not buildings, but gantry towers. Steel spiderworks for holding and launching rockets. Miles of them! Stoner saw, gaping. One after another, a whole city full of rocket-launching towers. It made Cape Canaveral look like a flimsy suburban development, modest in scale and temporary in endurance. This was built to last. Like Pittsburgh, like Gary, like the acres upon acres of factories in major industrial centers, Tyuratam was a solid, ongoing, workaday complex of giant buildings, vast machines, hardworking people.
Their business was launching rockets Their industry was astronautics. The place was a port, like fabled Basra of the Arabian Nights, like modern Marseille or New York or Shanghai. Ships sailed out of this port on long, bellowing tongues of flame, heading for destinations in space, bringing back new riches of knowledge.
And someday, Stoner knew, they’ll bring back energy, and raw materials, and they’ll start building factories up there in orbit.
But for now they probed the uncharted seas of space for knowledge, for safe harbors where satellites could orbit and relay information back to Earth.
The plane edged lower. Stoner could see spotlights blooming around one launch pad, where a tall silvery rocket stood locked in the steel embrace of a gantry tower.
That’s a Soyuz launcher, he realized. That’s the bird I’m going to fly on.
He did not notice, far off on the other side of the vast complex of towers and rockets, two other boosters standing side by side. They were painted a dull military olive-gray, and were topped by blunt-nosed warheads of megaton death.
Chapter 39
Religion
CALMING THE FEARS OF GEHENNA
Rudolfo Cardinal Benedetto, his brown eyes bright and alert despite the man-killing schedule he’s been keeping, looked up at the glowing sky and actually smiled.
“Now we know that we are not God’s only creatures,” he said in the soft accent of his native Lombardy. “Now, if God grants it, we shall communicate with our visitor.”
Cardinal Benedetto, the Vatican Secretary of State, has been holding the line against the more conservative members of the Curia ever since the news of the approaching alien burst upon the stunned world, in April. The papal Secretary spearheaded his Pope’s position that the alien spacecraft presents “no spiritual threat” to the souls of Roman Catholics. (See “The Pope Speaks Out,” page 22.)
Rumors have reached Rome that millions of Catholics around the world are panicked at the thought of an “anti-Christ” arriving from outer space. Reports have been heard of nightly rituals ranging from Catholic Masses to grisly pagan rites. From the Third World, tales of human sacrifices have been reported, and even in American cities church attendance has skyrocketed since the alien’s presence was announced….
Stoner sat hunched over the gray sheet of paper, ballpoint pen hesitating in midair. So far he had written:
Mr. Douglas Stoner
28 Rainbow Way
Palo Alto, CA 94302
Dear Son:
How are you? If you’ve been following the news at all, I guess you know by now that I’m in Russia, about to take off on a space mission to meet the alien spacecraft—if that’s possible. The Russians have made us very comfortable here. They put us up in a kind of barracks—sort of like a dormitory. We each have a small room to ourselves. Not that I spend much time in it.
For the past few weeks I’ve been working very hard with the Russian cosmonauts and launch team. You should have seen them trying to fit me into one of their pressure suits! I’m taller and slimmer than most of the cosmonauts and they had to do some fast custom tailoring to fit me. And their medical people have been all over me; you might think I was the alien the way they’ve been checking me out!
Everyone here has been very good to us although we are restricted to this barracks building and the few other buildings where we do our work. The Russians don’t like us roaming around. I suppose we would be equally careful with foreign visitors at Kennedy SFC in Florida.
There are eleven other foreign scientists here, in addition to...
He put the pen down. What difference does that make? he asked himself. Doug wouldn’t be interested in it.
Stoner pushed his chair back and stretched his arms over his head.
What the hell is Doug interested in? he wondered. He realized that he didn’t know his own son; the boy was a stranger to him. And his younger daughter he knew even less.
With a snort of self-disgust he slammed the pen down on the wooden desk, got up and headed for the door. He walked slowly down the narrow hallway. All the other doors were closed. It was not late; dinner had ended less than an hour earlier.
But tomorrow’s the big day, Stoner told himself. The final countdown. The launch.
Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. His previous launches, in America, had been livelier, busier. There were constant meetings, press conferences, get-togethers even late at night, news photographers poking their cameras at you.
Not here, he realized. No reporters. No photographers.
He went downstairs to the common room, where they ate their meals. One of the Chinese physicists was sitting in the leather chair in the corner, under the wall lamp, reading a book in Russian. Stoner nodded to him and the Chinese smiled back politely. His interpreter was gone and they could not converse.
Stoner looked over the round table in the middle of the room, scanned the mostly empty bookshelves, prowled restlessly toward the door of the kitchen and pushed it open.
Markov was bending over in front of the open refrigerator, peering into it.
“You had two helpings of dessert,” Stoner said.
Markov straightened up. “So? Spying on me? Well, I can’t help it. When I’m nervous, I eat. I must keep up my blood sugar, you know.”
“It was damned good baklava,” Stoner admitted. “At least the cooking here is first-rate.”
“Do you want some? That is, if there’s any left?”
“No.” Stoner shook his head. “When I’m nervous I can’t eat.”
Markov looked at him. “You, nervous? You look so calm, so relaxed.”
“I’ve got the jumps inside.”
With a disappointed sigh Markov closed the refrigerator. “It’s all gone,” he said. “Strange, I could have sworn there was some left.”
“Like Captain Queeg’s strawberries,” Stoner said.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
They drifted back into the common room. The Chinese physicist had left, but one of the Russians had taken the leather chair and turned on the radio on the bookshelf. Classical piano music filled the room.
“Is that Tchaikovsky?” Stoner asked.
Markov gave him a stern professorial glance. “That,” he said firmly, “is Beethoven. The ‘Pathétique Sonata.’”
Stoner refused to be cowed. “Tchaikovsky wrote a Pathétique too, didn’t he?”
“A symphony. It requires at least a hundred musicians and almost an hour’s time. Really, Keith, for a civilized man…”
“I just thought a Russian station would play only Russian composers.”
Markov began to reply, then realized that his leg was being pulled. He laughed.
“Come on,” Stoner said. “Let’s see if we can find some coffee.”
“Aren’t you supposed to refrain from stimulants tonight?” Markov asked. “I thought the medical…”