“You’ve got to, Nikolai!”
Federenko appeared at the hatch, his dark face set in a solemn frown. “I want to save our lives, not kill us foolishly.”
The exertion of wriggling halfway into the pressure suit made Stoner bob weightlessly across the orbital module. He put a hand against the ceiling to steady himself; his feet dangled inches from the floor.
“Sit down, Shtoner,” Federenko said. “Calm yourself.”
“Listen. I could take both backpacks—yours and mine. One to ride me out there, the other to get me back.”
“Foolishness.”
“But it’d work!” he said. “There’s enough fuel in the two of them to make it okay, isn’t there?”
Federenko turned away from him.
“Isn’t there?” Stoner grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Yes,” said the cosmonaut. “But I forbid it.”
Stoner went back to struggling into the pressure suit.
“Shtoner, I am in command.”
“And I’m a third-degree black belt,” he said, reaching down for his boots. “Are you going to help me or do we fight?”
“You will kill yourself.”
“Nikolai, if we get back to Earth I’ll have to live with myself. Do you think I could, knowing that we got this close and didn’t go the rest of the way? That sonofabitch has traveled light-years to reach us! The least I can do is cover the last hundred meters to meet him.”
Federenko said nothing. He solemnly watched as Stoner pulled on his boots and began zipping up the suit.
“Well, are you going to help me or are you going to just stand there and sulk?” Stoner taunted.
Scowling, Federenko pulled his own backpack from its rack and started adjusting its shoulder straps.
“You are killing me also,” he said. But he helped Stoner into the backpack.
The television screens at the front of the control center showed the alien spacecraft glowing against the star-flecked heavens. For long minutes now the Soyuz radio had been silent.
Jo sat at her computer console, every nerve tingling, stretched taut with tension, a headphone clamped over her glistening black hair.
“Go ahead, Houston,” she said into the lip microphone. “I can hear you clearly.”
Markov stood tensely behind her, and beside him Zworkin hovered like a protective mother hen. Uniformed security police armed with machine pistols stood a few yards off. Other men, bulky, hunch-shouldered, scowling men in dark suits prowled all through the huge command center, eying everyone suspiciously.
Jo watched her computer screen fill with data: numbers and symbols flashing across the tiny screen faster than any human eye could follow. She glanced up at the smaller wall screens flanking the main picture of the alien spacecraft. A new booster was being fueled hurriedly out on one of Tyuratam’s eighty working launch pads. A new tanker to be launched into a high-acceleration rescue trajectory. The Americans, with their faster and smarter computers, were working out the flight plan that would get the tanker to the Soyuz in time to save Federenko and Stoner. Jo had become the liaison link between Texas and Tyuratam.
The command center was astir with quiet, organized frenzy. Computers and humans were working their hardest. Markov gazed around the vast room and saw the security police, their steely eyes constantly moving, their hands never far from the guns they carried.
As if shooting up the place would help, he said to himself.
Zworkin had spent an hour on the phone with Bulacheff in Moscow. Great upheavals were taking place. Maria had been called off for questioning by her superiors. She’ll either be made a Hero of the Soviet Union for foiling the saboteurs or we’ll both end our days in prison, Markov knew. It all depends on who wins what in the Kremlin.
“Very good, Houston,” Jo said into her microphone. “The data’s coming through. Thank you.”
She yanked the headset off and let it clunk on the console’s desktop, then leaned back in her chair.
“They’ve got the big NASA computers working out the high-energy trajectory,” Jo said.
“Will that be enough?” Markov wondered. “Can they get the new tanker into position for them?”
Jo looked up at him, her dark eyes shadowed with fatigue and fear. “If they can’t, no one can.”
“What if ground command send up new orders, a new flight path that will get us back?” Federenko grumbled as he checked out Stoner’s suit. “You will be out there…”
“I’ll be in touch over the suit radio,” Stoner said.
“Da. And when I say to come back, you will say, ‘Not yet. One more photograph.’ ”
Stoner chuckled. Satisfied that the suit was sealed, Federenko handed him the helmet. Stoner pulled it on, locked it in place, slid down the visor and sealed it.
“I’ll come back when you tell me they’ve got us a new trajectory that’ll get us home,” Stoner said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.
Federenko looked unconvinced. He held up one finger, then squeezed back through the hatch into the command module and swung the hatch shut.
Stoner was alone now.
“Radio check,” the cosmonaut’s voice rumbled in his earphones. “Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Very good.”
Stoner glided over to the controls that pumped the air out of the orbital module. Nikolai’s giving me his backpack for this, he thought. If his rescue depends on going EVA, he’s just thrown his life away.
“Shtoner.”
“Yes?”
“Good luck, Shtoner.”
“Thanks, Nikolai. I appreciate…everything you’ve done.”
“Say hello to alien for me.”
Stoner laughed. “I will.”
He cycled the air out of the ovoid chamber and opened the outer hatch. Pushing the extra backpack out ahead of him, Stoner stepped out into nothingness. He drifted free of the Soyuz, then turned and surveyed the situation.
The Earth was far away. No longer a huge smear of awesome girth, it was now a crescent of blue and white hanging in the star-scattered dark. Stoner put out a gloved hand and covered the planet of his birth with an upraised thumb.
He could see the Moon, too, a smaller crescent. The Sun’s fierce blaze was over his left shoulder; he had no intention of looking in that direction, but he could see at the corner of his vision the glowing disk of the Sun’s zodiacal light: cosmic dust, rubble and debris left over from the formation of the planets, eons ago.
A slight soundless puff from the thrusters at his waist and he squarely faced the alien spacecraft. It floated serene and aloof inside its golden, pulsing aura of energy.
Slowly, tugging the spare backpack on its tether, Stoner approached the alien spacecraft.
“Nikolai, do you suppose that energy screen could do damage to a slow-moving object, like an astronaut?”
“Could be,” Federenko’s voice responded. “Keep talking…everything is relayed to Tyuratam automatically.”
“Okay.”
Describing what he was doing as he did it, Stoner pulled up the tether that held the extra backpack, reeled it up until the pack was in his grasp, then pushed it out ahead of him. The effort slowed his approach to the alien spacecraft as the backpack sailed out ahead of him, the long tether gradually, slowly unwinding.
“The tether’s insulated,” he said. “If the screen causes an electrical discharge it won’t run back up the line and zap me. I hope.”
He held his breath as the backpack glided into the glow of energy, then passed through it with no discernible effect.
“Did you see that, Nikolai?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Right. Good.” Stoner licked his lips. “Now it’s my turn.”
“Cameras are recording. Television transmission is working.”