Phase Space (20 page)

The crippled Soyuz settled neatly into the payload bay, as if the Shuttle orbiter had been designed for the job. Which, of course, it had.

Burdick got into his EVA suit and, with two of his crew, made his way out through the airlock in back of the flight deck. The big bay doors were gaping open, the silvered Teflon surfaces of their radiator panels gleaming in Earthlight. The bay itself was a complex trench, crammed with equipment, stretching sixty feet ahead of him.

Soyuz sat where it had settled, an ugly insect shape, cluttering up the bay.

The others worked their way around Soyuz, strapping it into position for the glide home. Burdick made his way to the nose of Soyuz, to the complex docking hatch there.

The hatch was already open, the docking probe disassembled. He was, it seemed, expected.

Burdick, alone, pushed his way into the Orbital Module. There were bright floodlights here. He shut the hatch behind him, as he’d been trained, and worked a control panel. He heard a hiss, as air gushed into the module.

The Orbital Module was a ball just big enough for one person to stretch out. It would have been discarded to burn up during the re-entry, so it was packed full of garbage: food containers and clothing and equipment wrappers, like a surreal blizzard. This crew had been going home, when their country went up in flames.

When the pressure was restored, Burdick cracked his bubble helmet and took it off. There was a stale smell, and his ears popped as pressure equalized.

The hatch to the Descent Module opened. Burdick drifted through.

The Descent Module cabin was laid out superficially like an old Apollo Command Module, with three lumpy-looking moulded couches set out in a fan formation. Big electronics racks filled up the space beneath the couches.

There was a single cosmonaut here, in an open pressure suit, staring up at him from the centre couch. He was squat, dark, his face as wide as the Moon. He looked to be about Burdick’s age.

‘
Dabro pazhalavat,
’ he said. ‘Welcome. I am Colonel Sergei Kozlov.’ He held up a little tray, with food. ‘Bread and salt. A traditional Russian greeting.’

‘The hell with it.’

‘Take the damn bread, General Philip Burdick.’

Burdick hesitated. Then he floated down, and took the bread. He chewed a little of it. It was heavy, sticky.

‘You know my name?’

‘
Konyeshna.
Of course. You were a Moonwalker. I saw you approach, on the surface of the Tranquillity Sea.’

‘Huh?’

‘I was teleoperating Lunokhod. I saw you wield your rock. It massed, I hazard, more than you collected as geological samples to bring home.’

‘We weren’t there for fucking geological samples.’

‘Indeed not. And you are not here for scientific purposes now, are you?’

‘Nor you, sir. We know this Soyuz is stuffed full of results from your surveillance activities on the Salyut.’

‘That is true. But what does it matter? General Burdick, I am the last serving Soviet officer. I have no one to report to.’

Burdick discarded his bread. ‘Colonel, you’ll come onto the flight deck, and we’ll take you home.’

‘Home?’

‘The United States.’

‘Will there be TV cameras? Will you parade me?’

‘We’ll land at Vandenburg. The air base in California.’

‘
Konyeshna.
Where I aim to apply for political asylum.’ He grinned. ‘Does that surprise you, General? But what have I to return to? The radioactive winds which blow across the steppe? Your slow dismantling of my nation?’

‘Rebuilding. We’ll rebuild your country. We aren’t barbarians.’

‘Thank you,’ Kozlov said dryly. ‘But it was unnecessary. Don’t you see that, General? We were no threat to you. Not really. Nor was Lunokhod. On the Moon, we were only curious, as you were. We were going to change anyway. We had to. We couldn’t afford to keep up with you. You could have waited. A little patience.’ Kozlov smiled. ‘But I forgive you. Come. I am impatient to see your wonderful Space Shuttle.’

Kozlov began to remove his couch restraints.

September 1993:

Burdick was impatient to see Phil’s Space Shuttle.

Here he was actually cutting his lawn, a real old geezer thing to do, here in the middle of Iowa. Just what he’d always imagined retirement to be, back home in small-town America, where he’d started from. Well, hell, he was sixty-three now, and thanks to the mess space radiation had made of his central nervous system – so the surgeons told him – he looked and felt a lot older. He was entitled to his gentle retirement.

Fay came out with a glass of chilled lemonade, and to remind him that the flight was due overhead.

He cut the mower’s engine. Grass clippings sank to the ground, slower than Moondust. He took off his hat and wiped the sunblock off his nose.

He limped to the porch chair. His right leg was paining him again, the one he’d broken a couple of times already. Premature osteoporosis, they said, all that bone calcium leached away in his piss in space, but what the hell.

He sat down, to wait to see Phil.

While he’d been cutting, ruminating, the sun had gone down on him. The first star was out: Venus, undoubtedly, down there on the horizon. There was one hell of an aurora tonight, reaching down from the north. Never used to get auroras in southern Iowa when he was a kid. Something to do with the bombs, the weather girl said.

There was some reading matter on the seat. Here was the speech by Curtis LeMay, venerable Chief of the Air Force, that he’d given to the USAF Association National Convention, out at Albuquerque. It was about his Sunday Punch scheme.

…
and even as we have crushed the heart of Asia, we have to look further ahead.

President Reagan’s decision to punish China’s assault on Space Station Freedom was brave and correct. Let the ruins of the Forbidden City stand forever as a monument to our determination to maintain our grip on the high frontier, space! And yet the Chinese leadership continues to defy us, in every international forum.

And meanwhile, the incursion in Turkey of the Arab League under Saddam Hussein is equally unacceptable. Our pre-emptive nuclear assault on Iraq was surgical, necessary and justified. Contrast that with Saddam’s recent assault, with Chinese CSS-2 missiles, on our Space Command base at RAF Fylingdales, England, exploiting a dirty and unreliable warhead.

We must not allow the warlords of darkened Asia to believe that we can be defied with impunity. Remember, these people are not like us! They are calculating, amoral machines. We must demonstrate our strength of arm and will to them. We have the whole of the future, the whole of infinite space, before us to conquer. But we must act now. We must show we are ready! …

The word was LeMay had Reagan’s ear.

Not that anyone knew how much that meant. Even as the Constitution was being bucked again to allow Reagan to run for a fifth term, the rumours were that Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was becoming pronounced, and his veep, Nixon, was the real power behind the throne. Burdick didn’t suppose it mattered.

The stars were coming out now, pushing through the remnants of the blue blanket of day. It was a good clear night: no rain, a light dew and the weather girl said there’d be no fall-out threat.

…
I am saying that we have to be prepared! If America is going to survive in this tough old world she has to show that she’s prepared to meet any threat, to fight to the last with utter inhibition, whenever she’s asked to.

Ladies and gentlemen, we won the Cold War with Project Control. Now I’m asking you to endorse our next great task, the demonstration of our will to all of Africa and Asia and Europe: the Sunday Punch …

LeMay was offering Burdick the chance to return to the Moon. Now, that would be a hell of a thing. Burdick wasn’t too old to fly. Such was the demand for experienced astronauts, with more than sixty Shuttle flights a year, there were plenty of creaky veterans older than Burdick still scooting about up there, including his old buddy Harry Singer, for instance, now so racked by calcium depletion – so they said, anyhow – that he couldn’t come back down again.

It would be interesting to see the Earth from space again. They sent up Walter Cronkite himself a year ago, when they inaugurated the new Shuttle fleet: fully reusable now, with the DC-10-sized orbiter riding to space on the back of a 747-sized winged booster, just like the first designs back in ’69 before the Congressional budget-choppers got ahold of the programme. It had been a hell of a thing to hear that familiar dark brown voice booming down from orbit.

But Cronkite’s descriptions of the Earth – the scarred steppes of Asia, the smoking rubble of eastern Europe, even the spreading darkness at the heart of America’s own cities – didn’t coincide much with his own recollections. Cronkite even claimed to have seen, from orbit, the destruction of Sioux City, Burdick’s own home town, by rebelling students and anarchists. It was a little hard to verify such things. The news was pretty heavily censored these days, for valid reasons of national security.

Still,
Pax Americana
somehow hadn’t worked out quite the way everyone thought.

Anyhow it was too late for Burdick. His time had come and gone. He was content to watch, now.

And besides –

Sunday Punch.
That cosmonaut defector he’d brought down from orbit, Sergei Kozlov, sent him long letters about the dangers of the project.

…
You aren’t like these others, my friend, these young ones in their un-American uniforms. You must see that some of them actually want it all to end – to pull down the house – to destroy all the little people, dirty and squabbling and unpredictable, who don’t understand their giant schemes …

Hell, Burdick wasn’t qualified to judge what Kozlov said. Kozlov was just some Russian who’d grabbed the opportunity to stay in the US, when it came to him, with both hands. He’d even managed to get his family out before the Chinese invasion and all hell finally broke loose over there.

But Burdick had to admit to a few doubts himself, deep in his gut. There were always unexpected consequences, of whatever you did.

Anyhow here came the Lockheed PowerStar: a brilliant flare of light, like a high-flying plane, climbing steadily over the dome of the sky.

It was time. He called Fay. She came out with more lemonade, and settled down beside him.

The power station was a rectangle of black solar cells, twenty miles long and four wide, with a cluster of Shuttle External Tank hab modules bolted to its spine, as productive as ten nuke plants, so relieving the lack of Mid-East gas that had half-crippled the economy for two decades now.

Pretty soon, it was said, the US wouldn’t need the rest of the planet at all.

If Burdick had one regret about his retirement it was that he hadn’t got up to orbit to see them putting the plant together, working the beam builders as they extruded their three-hundred yard lengths of foamed steel. It had made for great TV.

And there was a little firefly spark, climbing up the sky, right alongside the power plant: the orbiter
Eagle II,
commanded by Tom Gibson, carrying Burdick’s only son Philip on his first spaceflight. A hell of a thing: two generations of Burdicks, climbing into space.

The rookies seemed to be getting younger every year, to Burdick. Phil Jr was only 22. Well, it was an expansive programme. It ate up crew members.

Unexpected consequences.

Sunday Punch was such a damn huge blow, who could say what the consequences would be? Certainly not Burdick.

Not that he admitted as much to Sergei Kozlov, or Fay, or anyone else. He’d learned to keep a lot of his thoughts to himself. It was a lesson he’d learned on the surface of the Moon, in the rubble of Apollo 11. There were some things better left unsaid. Truth was just another weapon anyhow.

He watched as the PowerStar slid down the sky, taking Phil’s slowly converging orbiter with it, until it was lost in the deep blue haze on the horizon.

He sipped his lemonade. He could feel dew on his cheeks already. It made his skin-cancer scars itch.

He could always stay out another ninety minutes until Phil came round the Earth again. But it was kind of cold.