Burning Chrome

  ‘Pilot Tatjana, we both know that Grishkin here is the station’s most active samisdata pirate! We are all criminals, don’t you see? That’s the beauty of our system, isn’t it?’ His sudden, twisted smile was shockingly cynical. ‘Kosmograd is not the Potemkin, and you are not revolutionaries. And you demand to communicate with Marshal Gubarev? He is in custody at Baikonur. And you demand to communicate with the minister of technology? The minister is 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 spore lurked everywhere – 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 ressembled 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 ground-side,’ muttered 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 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.

  He drifted out of his Salyut into the docking sphere, batting at a length of printout that tried to coil around his head.

  He could still work quickly and efficiently with his good hand. He was smiling as he freed a large oxygen bottle from its webbing straps. Bracing himself against a handhold, he flung the bottle across the sphere with all his strength. It rebounded harmlessly with a harsh clang. He went after it, caught it, and hurled it again.

  Then he hit the decompression alalrm.

  Dust spurted from speakers as a Klaxon began to wail. Triggered by the alarm, the docking bays slammed shut with a wheeze of hydraulics. Korolev’s ears popped. He sneezed, then went after the bottle again.

  The lights flared to maximum brilliance, then flickered out. He smiled in the darkness, groping for the steel bottle. Stoiko had provoked a general systems crash. It hadn’t been difficult. The memory banks were already riddled to the point of collapse with bootlegged television broadcasts. ‘The real bareknuckle stuff,’ he muttered, banging the bottle against the wall. The lights flickered on weakly as emergency cells came on line.

  His shoulder began to ache. Stoically he continued pounding, remembering the din a real blowout caused. It had to be good. It had to fool Yefremov and the gun crew.

  With a squeal, the manual wheel of one of the hatches began to rotate. It thumped open, finally, and Tatjana looked in, grinning shyly.

  ‘Is the Plumber free?’ he asked, releasing the bottle.

  ‘Stoiko and Umansky are reasoning with the guard.’ She drove a fist into her open palm. ‘Grishkin is preparing the landers.’

  He followed her up to the next docking sphere. Stoiko was helping the Plumber through the hatch that led from the barracks ring. The Plumber was barefoot, his face greenish under a scraggly growth of beard. Meteorologist Umansky follow
ed them, dragging the limp body of a soldier.

  ‘How are you, Plumber?’ Korolev asked.

  ‘Shaky. They’ve kept me on the Fear. Not big doses, but – and I thought that that was a real blowout!’

  Grishkin slid out of the Soyuz lander nearest Korolev, trailing a bundle of tools and meters on a nylon lanyard. ‘They all check out. The crash left them under their own automatics. I’ve been at their remotes with a screwdriver so they can’t be overriden by ground control. How are you doing, my Nikita!’ he asked the Plumber. ‘You’ll be going in steep to central China.’

  The Plumber winced, shook himself, and shivered, ‘I don’t speak Chinese.’

  Stoiko handed him a printout. ‘This is in phonetic Mandarin. I WISH TO DEFECT, TAKE ME TO THE NEAREST JAPANESE EMBASSY.’

  The Plumber grinned and ran his fingers through his thatch of sweat-stiffened hair. ‘What about the rest of you?’ he asked.

  ‘You think we’re doing this for your benefit alone?’ Tatjana made a face at him. ‘Make sure the Chinese news services get the rest of that scroll, Plumber. Each of us has a copy. We’ll see that the world knows what the Soviet Union intends to do to Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev, first man on Mars!’ She blew the Plumber a kiss.

  ‘How about Filipchenko here?’ Umansky asked. A few dark spheres of congealing blood swung crookedly past the unconscious soldier’s cheek.

  ‘Why don’t you take the poor bastard with you,’ Korolev said.

  ‘Come along then, shithead,’ the Plumber said, grabbing Filipchenko’s belt and towing him toward the Soyuz hatch. ‘I, Nikita the Plumber, will do you the favor of your miserable lifetime.’

  Korolev watched as Stoiko and Grishkin sealed the hatch behind them.

  ‘Where are Romanenko and Valentina?’ Korolev asked, checking his watch again.

  ‘Here, my colonel,’ Valentina said, her blond hair floating around her face in the hatch of another Soyuz. ‘We have been checking this one out.’ She giggled.

  ‘Time enough for that in Tokyo,’ Korolev snapped. ‘They’ll be scrambling jets in Vladivostok and Hanoi within minutes.’

  Romanenko’s bare, brawny arm emerged and yanked her back into the lander. Stoiko and Grishkin sealed the hatch.

  ‘Peasants in space.’ Tatjana made a spitting noise.

  Kosmograd boomed hollowly as the Plumber, with the unconscious Filipchenko, cast off. Another boom and the lovers were off as well.

  ‘Come along, friend Umansky,’ said Stoiko. ‘And farewell, Colonel!’ The two men headed down the corridor.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Grishkin said to Tatjana. He grinned. ‘After all, you’re a pilot.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Alone. We’ll split the odds. You’ll be fine with the automatics. Just don’t touch anything on the board.’

  Korolev watched her help him into the sphere’s last Soyuz.

  ‘I’ll take you dancing, Tatjana,’ Grishkin said, ‘in Tokyo.’ She sealed the hatch. Another boom, and Stoiko and Umansky had cast off from the next docking sphere.

  ‘Go now, Tatjana,’ Korolev said. ‘Hurry. I don’t want them shooting you down over international waters.’

  ‘That leaves you here alone, Colonel, alone with our enemies.’

  ‘When you’ve gone, they’ll go as well,’ he said. ‘And I depend on your publicity to embarrass the Kremlin into keeping me alive here.’

  ‘And what shall I tell them in Tokyo, Colonel? have you a message for the world?’

  ‘Tell them…’ and every cliché came rushing to him with absolute lightness that made him want to laugh hysterically: One small step…We came in peace…Workers of the world…’ You must tell them that I need it,’ he said, pinching his shrunken wrist, ‘in my very bones.’

  She embraced him and slipped away.

  He waited alone in the docking sphere. The silence scratched away at his nerves; the systems crash had deactivated the ventilation system, whose hum he’d lived with for twenty years. At last he heard Tatjana’s Soyuz disengage.

  Someone was coming down the corridor. It was Yefremov, moving clumsily in a vacuum suit. Korolev smiled.

  Yefremov wore his bland, official mask behind the Lexan faceplate, but he avoided meeting Korolev’s eyes as he passed. He was heading for the gun room.

  ‘No!’ Korolev shouted.

  The Klaxon blared the station’s call to full battle alert.

  The gun-room hatch was open when he reached it. Inside, the soldiers were moving jerkily in the galvanized reflex of constant drill, yanking the broad straps of their console seats across the chests of their bulky suits.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ He clawed at the stiff accordion fabric of Yefremov’s suit. One of the accelerators powered up with a staccato whine. On a tracking screen, green cross hairs closed in on a red dot.

  Yefremov removed his helmet. Calmly, with no change in his expression, he backhanded Korolev with the helmet.

  ‘Make them stop!’ Korolev sobbed. The walls shook as a beam cut loose with the sound of a cracking whip. ‘Your wife, Yefremov! She’s out there!’

  ‘Outside, Colonel.’ Yefremov grabbed Korolev’s arthritic hand and squeezed. Korolev screamed. ‘Outside.’ A gloved fist struck him in the chest.

  Korlev pounded helplessly on the vacuum suit as he was shoved out into the corridor. ‘Even I, Colonel, dare not come between the Red Army and its orders.’ Yefremov looked sick now; the mask had crumbled. ‘Fine sport,’ he said. ‘Wait here until it’s over.’

  Then Tatjana’s Soyuz struck the beam installation and the barracks ring. In a split-second daguerreotype of raw sunlight, Korolev saw the gun room wrinkle and collapse like a beer can crushed under a boot; he saw the decapitated torso of a soldier spinning away from a console; he saw Yefremov try to speak, his hair streaming upright as vacuum tore the air in his suit out through his open helmet ring. Fine twin streams of blood arced from Korolev’s nostrils, the roar of escaping air replaced by a deeper roaring in his head.

  The last thing Korolev remembered hearing was the hatch door slamming shut.

  When he woke, he woke to darkness, pulsing agony behind his eyes, remembering old lectures. This was as great a danger as the blowout itself, nitrogen bubbling through the blood to strike with white-hot, crippling pain…

  But it was all so remote, so academic, really. He turned the wheels of the hatches out of some strange sense of noblesse oblige, nothing more. The labor was quite onerous, and he wished very much to return to the museum and sleep.

  He could repair the leaks with caulk, but the systems crash was beyond him. He had Glushko’s garden. With the vegetables and algae, he wouldn’t starve or smother. The communications module had gone with the gun room and the barracks ring, sheared from the station by the impact of Tatjana’s suicidal Soyuz. He assumed that the collision had perturbed Kosmograd’s orbit, but he had no way of predicting the hour of the station’s final incandescent meeting with the upper atmosphere. He was often ill now, and he often thought that he might die before burnout, which disturbed him.

  He spent uncounted hours screening the museum’s library of tapes. A fitting pursuit for the Last Man in Space who had once been the First Man on Mars.

  He became obsessed with the icon of Gagarin, endlessly rerunning the grainy television images of the Sixties, the newsreels that led so unalterably to the cosmonaut’s death. The stale air of Kosmograd swam with the spirits of martyrs. Gagarin, the first Salyut crew, the Americans roasted alive in their squat Apollo…

  Often he dreamed of Tatjana, the look in her eyes like the look he imagined in the eyes of the museum’s portraits. And once he woke, or dreamed he woke, in the Salyut where she had slept, to find himself in his old uniform, with a battery-powered work light strapped across his forehead. From a great distance, as though he watched a newsreel on the museum’s monitor, he saw himself rip the Star of the Tsiolkovsky Order from his pocket and staple it to her pilot’s certificate.

  When the knocking came, he knew that it m
ust be a dream as well.

  The hatch wheeled open.

  In the bluish, flickering light from the old film, he saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head. She wore goggles, a silk aviator’s scarf twisting behind her in free fall. ‘Andy,’ she said in English, ‘you better come see this!’

  A small, muscular man, nearly bald, and wearing only a jockstrap and a jangling toolbelt, floated up behind her and peered in. ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Of course I am alive,’ said Korolev in slightly accented English.

  The man called Andy sailed in over her head. ‘You okay, Jack?’ His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. ‘We weren’t expecting anybody.’

  ‘Neither was I,’ said Korolev, blinking.

  ‘We’ve come to live here,’ said the woman, drifting closer.

  ‘We’re from the balloons. Squatters, I guess you could say. Heard the place was empty. You know the orbit’s decaying on this thing?’ The man executed a clumsy midair somersault, the tools clattering on his belt. ‘This free fall’s outrageous.’

  ‘God,’ said the woman, ‘I just can’t get used to it! It’s wonderful. It’s like skydiving, but there’s no wind.’

  Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth. ‘But you don’t even have a launchpad,’ he said.

  ‘Launchpad?’ the man said, laughing. ‘What we do, we haul these surplus booster engines up the cables to the balloons, drop ’em, and fire ’em in midair.’

  ‘That’s insane,’ Korolev said.

  ‘Got us here, didn’t it?’

  Korolev nodded. If this was all a dream, it was a very peculiar one. ‘I am Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev.’

  ‘Mars!’ The woman clapped her hands. ‘Wait’ll the kids hear that.’ She plucked the little Lunokhod moon-rover model from the bulkhead and began to wind it.