“You were, Mr. Castle, but I guess the warning slipped off the glaze you got in your eyes in the second hour of your briefing. Don’t worry, though-unless you grow to like it out there, you probably won’t be gone more than an hour.”
“An hour?”
“That’s how much oxygen your main tank’s carrying.”
David D. Castle shrugged as best he could in the confines of the space suit and allowed the crew to screw on his helmet. He should have been excited, he realized, first time in space and all that. But by now, at a rough calculation, some twelve thousand Americans had preceded him, and manned space flights were so commonplace that even the local press at Cape Canaveral nowadays gave the event no more than a paragraph. Anyway, his mind was on the information he had to impart to Deputy Premier Anatoliy Badalovich.
Castle had rehearsed his brief with President Horatio Francis Turnbull personally. His command of the information, the circumspection that had become second nature as a result of a lifetime as a double agent, and his lawyerly sense of language’s nuances made him confident that he would perform the mission in his usual elegant and exemplary fashion.
“Docking in ninety seconds,” said Poldz. His attention was held by the monitor which showed the Soviet spaceship closing. The operation, which had been carried out countless times in the fitful bursts of cooperation that characterized the Russian and American conquest of space, was entirely automatic. The link-up would last only as long as Castle’s brief colloquy in space with the Russian-whose identity Poldz couldn’t even guess- required, after which Poldz’ ship would proceed to its scheduled three-hour supply rendezvous with American Scientific Space Station Number Four.
Over Poldz’ shoulder, Castle watched the approaching Russian ship and suddenly felt dead tired, even though the trip was less than half over. First there had been the flurry of conferences at the White House the past forty-eight hours, then the decision to negotiate, the call to Moscow on the hotline, the flight to Canaveral, the thundering takeoff of the James Madison, the tedious briefing, the long wait until the two ships’ orbits were synchronized, and finally the elaborate suiting up. He could sleep for the next stage of the trip, but he’d have to be strapped in again to his seat on the final descent. He marveled that some men actually found space travel pleasurable. ‘
A loud clank and shudder signaled that the mating of the two ships was achieved. Normally, the communicating doors would now be undogged and the smiling crews would exchange Russian vodka and American beefsteak, or perhaps a Russian Orthodox icon and the latest American porno cassette. On this trip, however, there would be no personal contact at all. Neither crew had been told the identity of the man their passenger would meet in space. For all they knew, in fact, it could be a woman.
“Open overhead hatch!” Poldz ordered.
A patch of blinding sunlight appeared overhead.
“Permission to disembark,” said Castle.
“Permission granted,” replied Poldz.
Castle pulled down the helmet’s sun visor and tapped the control on the panel in the suit over his left wrist, which disengaged the electromagnet that held his steel-shod shoes to the cabin floor. He flexed his knees, pushed off gently, and floated straight through the hatch into the sky. He edged his thrust lever forward, held it there two seconds as his instructor had briefed him, cut it back to neutral, and coasted. The distance between him and his ship lengthened to five or six hundred meters before his umbilical suddenly went taut, and he spun around in the sky like a burnt-out firewheel. He hit the attitude-stabilizer switch. His jets sputtered like a leaky steam valve, and his motion relative to the mother ship was arrested. Beyond the James Madison, from the north pole to well below the equator, the earth was swathed in a solid mantle of black smoke.
Now he saw a dim white spot rocketing toward him from the Salyut 1183. The white spot grew into a blob that finally resolved itself into a bloated space suit that wobbled cumbersomely around the American as the Russian maneuvered his jets to bring himself alongside Castle. He stretched out his hand. Castle missed it and grabbed his foot, bringing the gyrating figure to a halt.
Castle unreeled his communications line and plugged his jack in the box at the base of the other man’s helmet, who in turn plugged into Castle’s circuit. Immediately, on the inside surface of the visor in Castle’s helmet was projected the image of Deputy Premier Anatoliy Badalovich, smiling broadly. “Greetings, Deputy Premier Bada-lovich,” Castle said, “from President Horatio Francis Turnbull and myself, and from the peace-loving peoples of the United States to those of the Soviet Union.”
“And so forth and so on,” said Badalovich in almost unaccented English. “We can omit the hypocrisies, I believe, Mr. Vice-President, since only the two of us are here to listen to them-which in itself is an interesting commentary on ‘progress.'”
“Come again?”
“Well, after all, we had to come all this way, hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface, merely to be sure that we are not overheard by somebody’s electronic ears. If it weren’t for ‘progress,’ this conversation would have taken place along some forest path or in a meadow with cowbells tinkling in the distance.”
“Where we’d still have to be wearing these suits in order to be able to see each other without being asphyxiated, thanks to the damnable smoke you Russians have made to blanket the earth.”
“I beg to correct you, sir,” Badalovich said indignantly. “The fire, which not at all incidentally destroyed our wheat crop for the entire year, reducing the proletariat to a diet of potatoes and cabbage, was started by the renegade Ripley Forte. It is the United States and Texas, of which he was a dual citizen, who bear responsibility for this heinous crime. He-”
“He paid for his ‘crime’ with his life,” rejoined Castle. “And since we’re skipping the hypocrisies, maybe you’ll be good enough to stop pretending that it was Ripley Forte who started those fires. Our intelligence- so-called-finally figured out that you orchestrated the whole operation. Forte learned, or rather was allowed to learn, of the massive diversion of Australian wheat to Russia via Bangladesh and other ports. He tracked down the shipments, discovered that some wound up in the Crimea, the most accessible area in the Soviet Union to infiltration. Forte, being Forte, infiltrated, just as you planned he would. And when he got there-with astonishing ease-he was allowed to abstract samples of a chemical being extracted from domestic wheat, the deficit of which the Soviet Union made up for with imports of Australian wheat. The Soviet Union intended to contaminate the American water supply with that chemical, beta-3, in order to render the American people impotent through euphoria. And to make sure nobody missed the point, you engineered the defection of Valentin Shishlin, the vault of whose KGB courier plane conveniently happened to contain comprehensive plans for dosing the American watersheds with beta-3.”
“Fascinating!” Badalovich commented. “Is there more?”
“Plenty. The burning of the wheat fields, which you knew Forte would consider-as indeed it was-the only way to eliminate the beta-3 menace, was merely a cover for the Russian leadership to set fire to its own lignite mines.”
“Come, come!” chided Badalovich. “If it was fire in the mines we wanted, we could have set fire to them ourselves-openly, for are they not on our own Russian soil?”
“And risked nuclear bombing by the United States for polluting the atmosphere over the western hemisphere, with distressing and perhaps fatal consequences for much of its population? No, you couldn’t chance that. So you stage-managed Forte’s foray and lighted the lignite fires under cover of his wheat field conflagrations.”
“Is there any proof of this absurd scenario?” scoffed Badalovich. “Or am I to believe it as coming from an honest, incorruptible American?”
David D. Castle laughed sardonically. “Unfortunately, in our continuing conflict, we’ve never been as successful in penetrating the Soviet Union as you have been in honeycombing the United States with agents, turncoats, and outright traitors. Still, while we don’t have agents, we have brains. And satellites. Putting them both together, we observed that while you were frantically buying wheat in Australia, your own storehouses were bursting from the surplus of two consecutive years of good harvest. So, why should you buy? The answer: to set in train the sequence of events that would allow you to fire your lignite mines with impunity.”
Badalovich sighed. “Very well. Since we are up here alone with the stars, you may as well know you are entirely correct. The KGB did concoct the scheme to get Ripley Forte’s unwitting cooperation. The KGB did do all the nasty things of which you’ve accused us. And the fires still burn, and they’ll continue to burn. But not, as you poor Americans believe, to run up your laundry bills or make your eyes water or poison your crops with acid rain or put millions in the hospital with bronchial complaints. We’re doing it to-“