[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
leading the purge." With a decisive gesture he ripped the printout to pieces,
scraps of yellow flimsy scattering in free fall like slow-motion butterflies.
On the ninth day of the strike, Korolev met with Grishkin and Stoiko in the
Salyut that Grishkin would ordinarily have shared with the Plumber.
For forty years the inhabitants of Kosmograd had fought an antiseptic war
against mold and mildew. Dust, grease, and vapor wouldn't settle in free fall,
and spores lurked everywhere-in padding, in clothing, in the ventilation
ducts. In the warm, moist petri-dish atmosphere, they spread like oil slicks.
Now there was a reek of dry rot in the air, overlaid with ominous whiffs of
burning insulation.
Korolev's sleep had been broken by the hollow thud of a departing Soyuz
lander. Glushko and his wife, he supposed. During the past forty-eight hours,
Yefremov had supervised the evacuation of the crew members who had refused to
join the strike. The gun crew kept to the gun room and their barracks ring,
where they still held Nikita the Plumber.
Grishkin's Salyut had become strike headquarters. None of the male strikers
had shaved, and Stoiko had contracted a staph infection that spread across his
forearms in angry welts. Surrounded by lurid pinups from American television,
they resembled some degenerate trio of pornographers. The lights were dim;
Kosmograd ran on half power. "With the others gone," Stoiko said, "our hand is
strengthened."
Grishkin groaned. His nostrils were festooned with
white streamers of surgical cotton. He was convinced that Yefremov would try
to break the strike with beta-carboline aerosols. The cotton plugs were just
one symptom of the general level of strain and paranoia. Before the evacuation
order had come from Baikonur, one of the technicians had taken to playing
Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture at shattering volume for hours on end. And Glushko
had chased his wife, naked, bruised, and screaming, up and down the length of
Kosmograd. Stoiko had accessed the KGB man's files and Bychkov's psychiatric
records; meters of yellow printout curled through the corridors in flabby
spirals, rippling in the current from the ventilators.
"Think what their testimony will be doing to us groundside," muttered
Page 49
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Grishkin. "We won't even get a trial. Straight to the psikuska." The sinister
nickname for the political hospitals seemed to galvanize the boy with dread.
Korolev picked apathetically at a viscous pudding of chlorella.
Stoiko snatched a drifting scroll of printout and read aloud. "Paranoia with
a tendency to overesteem ideas! Revisionist fantasies hostile to the social
system!" He crumpled the paper. "If we could seize the communications module,
we could tie into an American Comsat and dump the whole thing in their laps.
Perhaps that would show Moscow something about our hostility!"
Korolev dug a stranded fruit fly from his algae pudding. Its two pairs of
wings and bifurcated thorax were mute testimony to Kosmograd's high radiation
levels. The insects had escaped from some forgotten experiment; generations of
them had infested the station for decades. "The Americans have no interest in
us," Korolev said. "Moscow can no longer be embarrassed by such revelations."
"Except when the grain shipments are due," Grishkin said.
"America needs to sell as badly as we need to buy." Korolev grimly spooned
more chlorella into his mouth, chewed mechanically, and swallowed. "The
Americans couldn't reach us even if they desired to. Canaveral is in ruins."
"We're low on fuel," Stoiko said.
"We can take it from the remaining landers," Korolev said.
"Then how in hell would we get back down?" Grishkin's fists trembled. "Even
in Siberia, there are trees, trees, the sky! To hell with it! Let it fall to
pieces! Let it fall and burn!"
Korolev's pudding spattered across the bulkhead.
"Oh, Christ," Grishkin said, "I'm sorry, Colonel. I know you can't go back."
When he entered the museum, he found Pilot Tatjana suspended before that
hateful painting of the Mars landing, her cheeks slick with tears.
"Do you know, Colonel, they have a bust of you at Baikonur? In bronze. I used
to pass it on my way to lectures." Her eyes were red-rimmed with
sleeplessness.
"There are always busts. Academies need them." He smiled and took her hand.
"What was it like that day?" She still stared at the painting.
"I hardly remember. I've seen the tapes so often, now I remember them
instead. My memories of Mars are any schoolchild's." He smiled for her again.
"But it was not like this bad painting. In spite of everything, I'm still
certain of that."
"Why has it all gone this way, Colonel? Why is it ending now? When I was
small I saw all this on television. Our future in space was forever-"
"Perhaps the Americans were right. The Japanese sent machines instead, robots
to build their orbital factories. Lunar mining failed for us, but we thought
there would at least be a permanent research facility of some kind. It all had
to do with purse strings, I suppose. With men who sit at desks and make
decisions."
"Here is their final decision with regard to Kosmograd." She passed him a
Page 50
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
folded scrap of flimsy. "I found this in the printout of Yefremov's orders
from Moscow. They'll allow the station's orbit to decay over the next three
months."
He found that now he too was staring fixedly at the painting he loathed. "It
hardly matters anymore," he heard himself say.
And then she was weeping bitterly, her face pressed hard against Korolev's
crippled shoulder.
"But I have a plan, Tatjana," he said, stroking her hair. "You must listen."
He glanced at his old Rolex. They were over eastern Siberia. He remembered
how the Swiss ambassador had presented him with the watch in an enormous
vaulted room in the Grand Kremlin Palace.
It was time to begin.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]