Voyage (50 page)

Well, it wasn’t working.

She stalked over to one of the techs, a burly guy in a shirt, grease-stained, that strained at his ample belly. ‘What’s so funny? Huh?’

Viktorenko came to her side and took her elbow. ‘You must be calm, my dear.’

She shook his hand off. ‘Oh, sure. Just as soon as these ill-mannered assholes –’

‘No,’ he said, and there was some steel in his voice.

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Soy-uz.’
He pronounced the word the way she had, as an American-eared best guess, with the syllables rhyming with ‘boy’ and ‘fuzz.’ Even to York’s ears it sounded clumsy. ‘That is what is so amusing. I suspect your English transliterations are at fault,’ he said
smoothly. ‘That “y” is perhaps deceptive. You see, in the standard orthography, “yu” stands for a specific Cyrillic letter, and so the “y” and “u” should not be split. The syllables are
So-yuz,
you see. Now. Since the stress is on the second syllable, we would allow the unstressed “o” of “So” to soften into a weaker “ah.” And then “yuz” has a long “u,” like “shoe.”
Sah-yooz
. But, of course, in speaking, final consonants tend to drift to the unvoiced. One must soften the “z” to “s.” So:
Sah-yooss. Sah-yooss.’

She tried it a couple of times, and drew an ironic hand-clap from the big, burly tech.

‘Better,’ Viktorenko said. ‘Now, you see, you have taken the trouble, here in my country, to pronounce correctly one of the three or four words of Russian with which one could reasonably expect an American astronaut to be familiar.’

She was aware of the tech watching her, a leer in his eyes. She glared back. These Russians were even more full of macho bull than their American counterparts.

But then, some of that might be to do with the lousy international situation. She tried to imagine what these men must feel about their countrymen fighting and dying in Afghanistan – and what went through their heads when they looked at her, a vulnerable, isolated American, and remembered the aggressive anti-Soviet rhetoric that had been emanating from the White House from the day Reagan had walked in. They’d be entitled to despise her, she supposed.

Her anger dissipated.
Hell. Maybe I deserve it
.

She shivered, and tried not to think about it.

A rope ladder came snaking down out of the Soyuz toward the ground.

She knelt at the summit of the Command Module, with the heavy hand of a tech on her shoulder to steady her. The Command Module was like the headlight of some huge car, upended on this plain, its green paint a striking contrast with the washed-out brown of the soil. From up here the steppe looked immense, intimidating, deserted save for the small group around the capsule; the sky was iron gray, a lid clamped tight over the land.

In the remote distance she spotted a silvery glint that might have been water. Some godforsaken landlocked salt lake.

Viktorenko clambered into the capsule first. He told York to give him a couple of minutes before following; he said he had to check the bolts holding the seats in place. As far as she could tell he was serious.

At last Viktorenko poked his head out of the hatch and waved her in. The technician pulled off her outer boots, and the anti-scratch cover she had worn over her helmet.

The cabin was laid out superficially like an Apollo Command Module – which, after all, was of the same vintage as this Soyuz technology – with three lumpy-looking moulded couches set out in a fan formation, their lower halves touching. Gingerly, feet first, she lowered herself down.

Vladimir Viktorenko was already in the commander’s seat, over at the left of the cabin. He waved her toward the other side. ‘Be my guest!’

She slid herself down, wriggling until she could feel the contours of the right-hand seat under her. The couch was too short for her, and compressed her at her shoulders and calves. The couches in a Soyuz were supposed to be moulded to the body of the cosmonaut; in this training rig the couches came in one size, to fit all, and were scuffed and battered from overuse.

The capsule was cramped even compared to the Apollo trainers she’d used, and was jammed full of bales of equipment for post-landing: parachutes, emergency rations, flotation gear, survival clothing. The main controls were set out in a panel in front of Viktorenko: a CRT screen, orientation controls on Viktorenko’s right, and maneuvering controls to his left. There was an optical orientation view-finder set up on a small porthole to one side of the panel. York recognized few of the instruments, actually. But it didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be doing any flying. And besides, in this landing-drill mockup, most of the controls were obviously dummies.

The capsule layout struck her as truly clunky. It was all sharp corners; and some of the controls were so far from the cosmonauts’ hands that they were provided with sticks to poke at the panels. It was low-tech, utilitarian.

There was a small, circular pane of glass at York’s right elbow. She peered out of this now, trying to lose herself in the view of gray sky and flat steppe.

Ralph Gershon came clambering down from the hatch. His boots and knees were everywhere, clattering into the equipment banks and against York and Viktorenko. The Russian laughed hugely, and playfully batted away Gershon’s clumsier movements.

Gershon twisted into the center seat and plumped down, compressing her against the wall; their lower legs were in contact, and there was no space for her to move away. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Ralph.’

Gershon, chewing Juicy Fruit, seemed cheerful enough. ‘Lighten up, York. This ain’t so bad. At least we’re out of the fucking wind.’

Viktorenko reached over Gershon and pushed closed the inner hatch, a fat plug of metal. Immediately the wind noise, the chattering of the technicians, was cut off, and York felt sealed in. Entombed.

She heard the techs slam shut the outer hatch.

The noise of the chopper increased to a muffled drone. She felt her heart pump harder. There was a pounding on the hull, and then a soft, slithering scraping, as, York guessed, cables slid over the surface of the craft.

Ralph Gershon picked his gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his seat, seemingly unconcerned.

The chopper’s engine roared. There was a brief strobing of the light at her window – helicopter blades, passing over the Command Module – and then a yank upwards, as if the Soyuz had turned into a high-speed elevator.

York felt the air rush out of her lungs, and the pressure points of her couch dug into her back and hips.

Beyond her window the receding steppe rocked back and forth like a plaster-of-paris model in a sim. She saw a little circle of engineers, waving their caps, their faces turned up like dusty flowers.

Grit fled in concentric circles across the steppe, away from the capsule, and the technicians staggered back, shielding their eyes.

Then she could no longer see the ground: her window was a disk of clouded sky.

York’s pressure suit was getting hot. She could feel perspiration pooling under her, in a little slick that gathered in the small of her back. But at the same time, thanks to some quirk of the Soviet suit’s cooling system, her feet were cold. She tried to curl up her toes, inside the layers which constrained them.

Gershon, lying beside her, was all elbows.

There was a TV camera – a crude-looking thing, like something out of the 1950s – fixed to the cabin wall, just above Gershon’s head. York didn’t know if it was live or not. A small metal toy, a spaceman, dangled in front of the lens on a metal chain; as the cabin swung about under the chopper, the little toy rocked back and forth.

Viktorenko caught her eyeing the model. ‘You are admiring my friend Boris.’ He pronounced it
Bah-reess
. ‘Boris has a major role to play, in the correct functioning of the Soyuz.’ He pointed. ‘You
see the TV camera. That is trained on Boris at all times. By watching his antics, the ground can determine the exact moment at which we become weightless. Ingenious, no? …’

Now the capsule lurched to the right. York felt the weight of the two men compressing her against the wall.

Viktorenko roared with approval. ‘It is just like Disney World! Ha ha! Now, Ralph and Natalie. You must imagine that we are returning to Earth aboard a
real
Soyuz, perhaps after spending a hundred days or more aboard our wonderful space platform Salyut. We have endured the gentle buffeting of reentry – a mere three or four G, thanks to the cunning aerodynamic design of the Command Module – and soot has coated our window following the scorching friction of the air. But we discard our window shields, and we see bright sunlight, a Kazakhstan morning. Now here come the parachutes: the three drogues,
crack crack crack
in swift succession, and then the main chute, a great white sail above us.’ Viktorenko mimed a slow, feather-like rocking. ‘So we drift downwards, like a snowflake, all three tonnes of us …’

She closed her eyes. She was certain something was intended to go wrong, somewhere down the line. It was just a question of when, and how bad it would be, and whether she’d be able to cope when it came. It was like every sim: this was a sadistic game, in which Viktorenko was in complete control. And the bastard knew it.

‘And now the moment approaches,’ Viktorenko said. ‘The reunion with the mother planet! But her embrace is hard. So compressed gases have been pumped into the base of your seats, to absorb the shock, you see. And, less than two meters from the ground, retrorockets will fire to cushion the impact. Of course we have no retrorockets, for this is only a training mockup … Perhaps we will be fortunate, and the wind will be low; otherwise, we may bounce –’

There was a crackle, a brief Russian message on the radio. Viktorenko acknowledged and checked a chronometer. ‘Three, two, one.’

Loose cables clattered against the hull. The chopper had released the capsule.

The Command Module
fell,
dragging her down with it.

The Soyuz slammed against a hard surface, with a vast metallic slap.

The impact was more violent than York had expected. Her ill-fitting couch rammed into her back, all the pressure points gouging her body.

‘Fuck,’ Gershon gasped.

At least I’m down
. She glanced around, quickly, at the still, almost silent cabin; she could hear the distant noise of the climbing chopper.
Is that it? Is it over? No bouncing, no dragging – are we down?

Then the capsule tipped to her left, quite smoothly, so that her weight was pressed against Gershon’s.

‘Fuck,’ Gershon said again.

York shouted, ‘What the hell’s this, Vladimir?’

The window beyond Viktorenko was briefly darkened, though York couldn’t see by what. Viktorenko grinned. ‘Evidently something has gone wrong.’

Now the capsule started to roll the other way, to York’s right, and the weight of the two men came down on York again. Beyond her window, obscuring the glass, water, silvery-gray with murk, was bubbling up.

So that’s it. This is the carefully designed screw-up. The Soyuz is supposed to come down on land …

‘Fuck,’ said Gershon.

‘Welcome to Ozero Tengiz,’ Viktorenko said. ‘Tengiz Lake, a salt lake all of twenty miles wide, and less than a hundred miles from –’

York groaned. ‘Do we really have to go through with this? I mean, rehearsing for an emergency water landing?
After
an emergency retrieval from orbit by a Soyuz?’

‘Would you rather endure such an occurrence without preparation? All of your training has a context. You must understand that. Our cosmonauts are trained to handle all conceivable survivable emergencies.’

‘Not the un-survivable ones,’ York said.

‘But few points in a mission are true dead zones; in most situations there are options. The present exercise covers just one contingency. Of course for this particular exercise you must thank my old friend, Joseph Muldoon.’

Gershon retrieved his wad of gum from the base of his chair, mashed it in his gloved hand to make it soft, and pushed it back into his mouth. ‘Fuck Muldoon,’ said Gershon. ‘And fuck you.’

The Russian watched with appalled fascination.

York said, ‘All right, Vladimir, we’ll play ball. What’s the drill?’

‘Survival gear,’ Viktorenko said. He unzipped his pressure suit.

York felt enormously weary. But she didn’t have a choice.

She took off her helmet and jammed it behind her seat.

The outermost layer of her suit was a coverall of a tough artificial
fabric, with pockets and tool-loops and flaps. It opened up at the front, revealing the flaps of cloth called the ‘appendix,’ bound up with rubber bands; when York slipped off the bands the bunched material unfolded.

With the outer suit layer lolling around her like a deflated balloon, York went to work on the inner layer, of an airtight, elasticated material.

In the restricted space, with the ceiling of the cabin just inches from her nose, movement was virtually impossible, and she kept catching at controls and switches with her feet and hands. The interior of the cabin was becoming chaotic now, with the squirming bodies of the three of them and discarded bits of equipment sloshing back and forth in the confined, rocking space.

‘It is easier if you help each other!’ Viktorenko called cheerily.

‘Fuck off,’ Gershon said.

When her pressure garment was off, she was down to her long thermal underwear. She started to pull on her survival gear: a red sweater, a jumpsuit, a jacket, thickly padded trousers, an outer jacket …

‘But this is poor,’ growled Viktorenko. ‘Poor! You must work as a team. On Mars, forty million miles from Earth, there are only your crewmates. You must turn to each other for aid as a child might turn to his mother, instinctively, without asking. Do you understand? And that aid must be offered without calculation or hesitation. It is the way you must adopt. Tomorrow we will do this better.’

‘You must be kidding,’ York snapped. ‘We have to go through all this again?’

Viktorenko, pulling on his own gear, continued to lecture them. ‘Listen to me. Our Soviet training is tougher than yours, and some within NASA have come to understand this. In some of our exercises, there is no chance of seeking help. There is no rescue team! For there will be none on Mars! It is all purposeful. For, when a man realizes a mistake might cost him his health or even his life, the situation is transformed. Suddenly there is an incentive to concentrate.