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 at- mosphere, 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, Yefre- mov 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 degen- erate trio of pornographers. The lights were dim; Kos- mograd 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 Tchaikov- sky’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 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 chiorella. Stoiko snatched a drifting scroll of printout and read aloud. “Paranoia with a tendency to overesteem ideas! Revisionist fantasies hostile to the social sys- tem!” 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 hostil- ity!” Korolev dug a stranded fruit fly from his algae pud- ding. Its two pairs of wings and bifurcated thorax were mute testimony to Kosmograd’s high radiation levels. The insects had escaped from some forgotten experi- ment; generations of them had infested the station for decades. “The Americans have no interest in us,” Korolev said. “Muscow can no longer be embarrassed by such revelations.” “Except when the grain shipments are due,” Grish- kinsaid. “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,” Kor- olev 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 lec- tures.” 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 televi- sian. Our future in space was forever ” “Perhaps the Americans were right. The Japanese sent machines instead, robots to build their orbital fac- tories. 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 Kosmo- grad.” 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.”