The farewell committee, she thought.
Stoner stopped as he came next to her. “So long, kid. Thanks for everything.”
She froze, unable to move her hands, pinned against the wall by the crowd of technicians.
“Good luck, Keith,” she managed to whisper.
He leaned over, kissed her lightly. “I’ll be back,” he whispered.
Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs in his flight boots, Markov slightly ahead of him, the technicians following behind.
Jo stood there, suddenly alone in the upstairs hallway, and thought:
At least he’s on his way. They won’t try anything now. If they did, it would kill the cosmonaut who’s going up with him.
It was nearly midnight in Washington, but the Oval Office was brightly lit and filled with the President’s advisers.
“How long before lift-off?” asked the press secretary.
“Less than two hours now,” the science adviser answered. She was sitting rigidly upright on one of the straight-backed chairs that had been brought in from the secretary’s office.
“When do we start praying?” cracked Senator Jay. He was working on his third scotch of the evening.
“I started an hour ago,” the President said from behind his desk.
Their eyes were all riveted on the TV screen built into the wall of the Oval Office. It displayed the picture being relayed out of Tyuratam without the interruptions of the networks’ commercial coverage. The President could, at the touch of a button on his desk, switch on commentary from any network he chose, or from the NASA analysts who were monitoring the broadcast from the basement offices under the West Wing. At the moment, the CBS News commentary was being shown, printed on a smaller screen beneath the big picture. The President kept the sound off.
Walden C. Vincennes, tanned and handsome in his flowing, leonine gray hair, somehow had managed to get the old Kennedy rocker for himself and place it to the right of the President’s desk.
“If they pull this off, Mr. President,” he said, his rich baritone cutting through the other conversations buzzing around the room, “your stock will go up incredibly high.”
“Perhaps,” said the President. “We’ll see.”
The press secretary focused his attention on the two of them, even though he was sitting all the way across the room, wedged into the couch between Senator Jay and General Hofstader.
Vincennes smiled like a movie star. “You know, Mr. President, if all this goes well, the people might demand that you reconsider your decision not to run again.”
The President shook his head. “I doubt it.”
“There could be a draft at the convention.”
“No.”
“I’ve heard…talk.”
It seemed to take an effort for the President to pull his eyes from the TV screen. “Walden, if we make contact with this alien spaceship, and if it’s not hostile, and if there’s a lot to be gained from the contact—don’t you think I’ll have my hands full, between now and November? How could I campaign for re-election and do justice to all that?”
Vincennes put on a thoughtful look. His smile faded by degrees, but the press secretary thought his eyes looked even happier than they had when he’d been smiling.
“I suppose you’re right,” Vincennes said.
“And if this doesn’t go well,” the President went on, “if that young man dies or the alien turns out to be hostile or some form of monster…then I’m finished anyway.”
“That’s true. But I’m sure it will all go well.”
The press secretary laughed to himself. Vincennes is angling for the Chief’s endorsement as the party’s candidate. I’ll be damned! He really wants to run for it! Then he thought, more seriously, I ought to have a long talk with him about it. He’ll need an experienced staff, after all.
In California it was 9 P.M. and all the prime-time television shows had been pre-empted for the live coverage of the space shot.
Doug and Elly Stoner sat in their grandparents’ living room, watching the TV set. Their mother was out with friends. Their grandparents flanked them on the long sectional sofa as Walter Cronkite explained:
“This will be the most difficult and complex manned space mission ever attempted, demanding as it does that the astronaut-cosmonaut team fly four times deeper into space than any human being has ever gone before.”
Cronkite was sitting at a curved command console of a desk. Behind him a four-color chart showed the position of the Earth, the Moon and the alien spacecraft.
“Already, a team of Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soviet space station Salyut Six has assembled three modules rocketed up from Tyuratam over the past two weeks.”
Pictures of the space modules appeared behind Cronkite’s ear, replacing the chart. The modules were silvery cylinders with bent-wing panels of solar energy cells jutting out from each side. Each module bore the red letters CCCP stenciled on its side.
“These modules contain the air-recycling equipment, food and water for the two-week-long space mission,” Cronkite went on, “as well as the scientific apparatus with which the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut will study the alien spacecraft, and—if everything goes very well—make a rendezvous in space with this visitor from a distant solar system.”
Doug fidgeted nervously on the sofa, wishing for a beer. His sister shot him a stern glance, then returned her attention to the television screen.
“Piloting the Soyuz spacecraft will be Major Nikolai Federenko, a veteran of three earlier Soviet space missions. The scientist-astronaut will be Dr. Keith Stoner, of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration—NASA. Dr. Stoner…”
For some ridiculous reason, tears sprang up in Doug’s eyes. He kept his face rigidly staring forward, toward the blurring TV screen, and felt thankful that the living room was too dark for his grandparents or his sister to see him.
Markov had no children and his only sibling—an older sister—had married and moved off to an industrial city in the Caucasus while Kirill was still in college. So the emotional swirl of walking Stoner through the long morning caught him unaware.
As the American’s translator, Markov went every step of the way with Stoner as they entered the launch control building, sat down for the final physical checkup (a simple blood test and EKG) and then went downstairs to suit up.
“It’s like a bridegroom putting on his tuxedo,” Stoner said as a pair of white-smocked technicians helped him climb into the bulky, cumbersome pressure suit.
Markov sat on a bench and leaned his back against a metal locker. “More like a knight putting on his armor,” he observed.
Next they went out to a minibus and drove to the launching pad. With four other technicians crowding into the rickety elevator cab, they rode to the top of the launch tower. Stoner looked to Markov as if some puffy white headless monster had almost completely swallowed him. Markov felt jittery, almost sick to his stomach, as if he had forgotten something vital, as if something terribly wrong was about to happen.
But these are all good, hardworking men. They have devoted their lives to our space programs. They wouldn’t deliberately sabotage their own work. They couldn’t!
Yet he felt far from reassured. It only takes one rotten apple, whispered a coiled cobra inside his brain.
The elevator opened onto a cramped enclosure teeming with technicians in the inevitable white coveralls. A featureless tube of smooth gray walls led out of the enclosure, ending at the hatch of the Soyuz spacecraft.
Stoner turned toward his friend. “This is as far as you go, Kirill. Launch crew only from here on.”