Ben Bova - Voyagers

“I believe they will,” Reynaud answered. “Stoner won’t let anything stop him.”

The General Secretary also sat propped up in bed, watching the final moments of the countdown on his private television set. Borodinski sat next to the big, heavily blanketed bed.

“It is going well, Comrade Secretary,” the younger man said without taking his eyes off the screen. “You must be very proud this morning. The whole world is watching Russia lead the way to a meeting with the alien.”

But the General Secretary had closed his eyes. His chin slumped to his chest. His final breath was a long, soft sigh of release.

Stoner lay on his back in the cramped spherical capsule of the Soyuz spacecraft. Helmet on, visor locked and sealed, gloved hands resting on his knees. And sweating. His legs dangled up above him. Like a turtle on its back, he thought. Useless and in danger.

He turned his head to see Federenko, in the left seat, but the helmet blocked his view. He could hear the cosmonaut, though, in his earphones, chatting happily with the launch control engineers in Russian. Stoner guessed at what they were saying.

“Internal power on.” A row of lights on the panel a few inches over his head winked on, green.

“Life support systems, on.”

“Guidance computer, on.”

“Air pressure, normal.

The cosmonaut’s gloved fingers flicked across the switches of his control panel like a pianist testing a new instrument. One by one, the banks of lights lit up.

“Shtoner,” Federenko’s bass rumbled.

“Yes?”

“You can pick up the countdown at Teh minus one meenute, at my mark …Mark .”

T minus one minute. Stoner heard the Russian words in his earphones. He appreciated Federenko’s taking the moment out to give him a translation. Now his own mental clock could click off the last sixty seconds in cadence with the Russian launch controller’s voice.

Stoner’s eyes flicked over the control panel. Every light and switch had been hastily labeled in English. He had crammed a year’s worth of orientation into a few weeks. But I can fly this bird if I have to, he told himself. They can maneuver it remotely from the ground, of course, but I can override them if I have to. I can fly her.

His hands were slippery with sweat inside the silvered gloves. He hoped he wouldn’t have to take over control of the spacecraft.

T minus thirty seconds.

Jo stood on the roof of their barracks building, peering into the brightening sky and the rocket booster, several kilometers away.

Don’t let anything go wrong, she prayed silently. Don’t let anything go wrong.

The loudspeaker boomed in Russian for several moments, then in English:

“A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE SOVIET UNION. GOOD FORTUNE TO THE TWO BRAVE MEN WHO GO TO MEET THE ALIEN SPACESHIP THE HEARTIEST ADMIRATION AND GOOD WISHES OF THE SOVIET PEOPLE FLY WITH YOU ON YOUR GALLANT MISSION.”

Before the echoes could die away, the voice added:

“T MINUS FIFTEEN SECONDS.”

T minus ten seconds, Stoner counted mentally.

He could feel his heart pounding wildly as he went on, Five, four, three…

The booster trembled beneath them. Pumps starting up.

“…one, zero…”

He heard the Russian word for Ignition! and felt the whole capsule shudder. A dull growl from somewhere deep within, exploding into an ear-shattering bellow as millions of demons howled their loudest and a heavy, implacable hand squeezed down on his chest, pressed him into his seat, shook him with bone-jarring violence.

Stoner felt the breath forced out of him. His eyeballs were pressing back in their sockets. The noise was overpowering, a solid wall that pressed his eardrums flat. He couldn’t lift his hands from the armrests. His spine was being crushed. And the noise, the noise and vibration rattling him…

Across the whole world hundreds of millions watched the gleaming rocket climb upward on its tongue of flame, straight and stately as if guided along an invisible taut wire, rising slowly, majestically, then accelerating, higher, faster, into the cloud-flecked blue, faster now, arcing over, flame bellowing from its rocket nozzles, racing across the sky, dwindling from view.

In Moscow a huge roomful of hardened correspondents broke into cheers as the booster hurtled across the sky.

In New York, Walter Cronkite stood up at his desk, startling the cameramen, who abruptly jerked their cameras upward to keep him in frame. Millions of viewers thought they heard Cronkite mutter, “Go, baby, go.”

Jo watched the rocket lift off, its exhaust flame brighter than anything she’d ever seen before. The booster rose in eerie silence, up and up, higher and higher, without a sound to be heard. Then the overwhelming roar reached her, washed over her rooftop perch, wave after wave of solid white noise, making the whole building shake. Jo imagined she could feel the heat from the rocket engines, knew it was all in her mind, but felt it anyway.

Good-by, Keith, she said to herself. Somehow she felt, deep within her, that she would never see him again.

The mind-numbing roar eased away and finally died altogether. The pressure dwindled until Stoner saw that his arms were floating free of the seat rests. He felt light-headed, and for a moment his innards told him that he was falling. Squeezing his eyes shut hard enough to make them tear, he opened them and he was no longer lying on his back but sitting upright in the Soyuz capsule. Nothing had changed but his perspective.

“Shtoner,” Federenko’s deep voice rumbled in his earphones. “You okay?”

He nodded. “Okay, Nikolai. I’m fine. You?”

“All good.”

Stoner’s vision was blurred. “Okay to open my helmet?”

But Federenko was on the radio, checking back with mission control. Stoner waited until he was finished, then asked again.

“Yes, yes. Cabin pressure is normal. All systems are good, ground control confirms.”

Stoner slid the visor up, pulled his gloves off and wiped at his eyes. The gloves drifted out toward the control panel and he grabbed at them, grinning to himself.

“Zero gravity,” Federenko said. “You remember? Do not make crumbs when you eat.”

Stoner laughed and took a deep, easy breath. For the first time in nearly two years he was weightless. The pleasure of it was euphoric.

“Was a good launch, no?”

“Perfect,” Stoner said.

“Now we make contact with Salyut by radio, then go EVA to dock with equipment and supply vessels.”

Stoner pulled out the clipboard that was mounted on the panel to his right. In both Russian and English it listed every task they must do, the day and hour it must be started, and how long they had to complete each.

“You make the first EVA,” Stoner said.

“Da.”

“I’ll watch the store.”

Federenko peered from around the edge of his helmet. “Watch store?”

“It’s an American expression.” Stoner tried to explain it to him.

Federenko listened, frowning deeply. “But there is no one here to steal from store.”

Shrugging inside his bulky pressure suit, Stoner said, “Well, Nikolai, you know how it is in a capitalist society. So many thieves that we expect them everywhere.”

It made no impact on the cosmonaut. “But no thieves in orbit. No thieves aboard Salyut. They are both good Soviet citizens; officers in Red Army.”

Stoner grinned weakly and gave it up.

Borodinski was on the special picturephone that the General Secretary had set up in his quarters. The beefy-faced man in the viewing screen wore the collar of a soldier with the tab insignia of a major general.