Short fiction complete, p.154
Short Fiction Complete, page 154
Sam Gunn, of course, was an American astronaut. Officially, he was a crew member of the NASA space station. Secretly, he worked for the CIA, I am certain. No other explanation fits the facts.
You must understand that despite all the comforts that socialist technology could provide, life aboard Mir 5 was—well, spartan. We worked in shifts and slept in hot beds. You know, when one man finished his sleep shift, he got up from his zippered bag, and a man who had just finished his work shift got into the bag to sleep. Sixteen hours of work, eight hours of sleep. Four bunks for twelve crewmen. It was all strictly controlled by ground command.
Of course, as colonel in command, I had my own bunk and my own private cubicle. This was not a deviation from socialist equality; it was necessary, and all the crew recognized that fact. My political officer also had his own private cubicle, naturally.
Believe me, after the first eighteen months of living under such stringencies, life became very tense inside Mir 5. Fourteen men cooped up inside a set of aluminum cans, with nothing but work, no way to relieve their tedium, forced to exercise when there were no other tasks to do—the tension was becoming dangerously high. Sam must have known that. I was told that the CIA employed thousands of psychologists in those days.
His first visit to our station was made to look like an accident. He waited until I was asleep to call us.
My second-in-command, a thick-headed Estonian named Korolev, shook me awake none too gently.
“Sir,” he said, pummeling my zippered bag, “there’s an American asking us for help!”
It was like being the toothpaste in a tube while some big oaf tries to squeeze you out.
“An Ameri—stop that! I’m awake! Get your hands off me!”
Fortunately, I slept in my coveralls. I simply unzippered the bag and followed Korolev toward the command center. He was a bulky fellow, a wrestler back at home and a decent electronics technician up here. But he had been made second-in-command by seniority only. His brain was not swift enough for such responsibilities.
The station was composed of nine modules—nine aluminum cans joined together by air locks. It was all under zero gravity, of course. It would still be several years before the Americans built their fancy rotating station.
We floated through the hatch of the command center, where four more of my men were hovering by the communications console. It was cramped and hot; six men in the center was at least one too many.
I immediately heard why they had awakened me.
“Hey, are you guys gonna help me out, or let me die?” a sharp-edged voice was rasping on our radio receiver. “I got a dead friggin’ OTV here, and I’m gonna drift right past you and out into the Van Allen Belt and fry my ass if you don’t come and get me.”
That was my introduction to Sam Gunn.
Zworkin, my political officer, was already in contact with ground control, reporting on the incident. On my own authority—and citing the reciprocal rescue treaty that had been in effect for more than two decades—I sent one of our orbital transfer vehicles with two of my best men to rescue him.
His vehicle’s rocket-propellant line had ruptured, with the same effect as if your automobile fuel line had split apart. The rocket engine died, and he was drifting without power.
“Goddamn cheap Hong Kong parts.” Sam kept up a running monologue all through our rescue mission. “Bad enough we gotta fly birds built by the lowest bidders, but now they’re buying parts from friggin’ toy manufacturers! Whole goddamn vehicle works like something put together from a Mattel kit by a brain-damaged chimpanzee. Those mother-humpers in Washington don’t give a shit whose neck they put on the mother-humpin’ line as long as it ain’t theirs.”
And so on, all through the three hours it took for us to send out a two-man transfer vehicle, take him aboard it, and bring him safely to our station.
Once he came through the air lock and actually set foot inside Mir 5, his tone changed. Of course, “set foot” is a euphemism. We were all weightless, and Sam floated into the docking chamber, turned himself a full 360 around, and grinned at us.
All twelve of us had crowded into the docking chamber to see him. This was the most excitement we had had since Boris Malenovsky’s diarrhea, six months earlier.
“Hey!” said Sam. “You guys are as short as me!”
No words of thanks. No formal greeting or offers of international friendship. His first words upon being rescued dealt with our heights.
He was no taller than my own 160 centimeters, although he claimed to be 165. He pushed himself next to Korolev, the biggest man of our crew, who stood almost 173 centimeters, according to his medical file. Naturally, under zero gravity he—and all of us—had grown an extra two or three centimeters.
“I’m just about as tall as you are!” Sam exulted.
He flitted from one member of our crew to another, comparing heights. It was difficult to make an accurate measurement, because in zero gravity he kept bobbing up slightly. He cheated, in other words. I should have recognized this as the key to his character immediately. Unfortunately, I did not.
Neither did Zworkin, although he later claimed that he knew all along that Sam was a spy.
All in all, Sam was not unpleasant. He was friendly; he was noisy. I remember thinking, in those first few moments he was aboard our station, that it was like having a pet monkey visit us. Amusing. Diverting. He made us laugh, which was something we had not done in many weeks.
Sam’s face was almost handsome, but not quite. His lips were a bit too thin and his jaw a little too stubbornly square. His eyes were dark and glowing like a fanatic’s. His hair was thick and medium brown. His tongue was never still.
Most of my crew understood English well enough so that Sam had little trouble expressing himself. Which he did incessantly. Sam kept up a constant chatter about the shoddy construction of his orbital transfer vehicle, the solid workmanship of our station, the lack of esthetics in spacecraft design, the tyranny of ground controllers who forbade alcoholic beverages aboard the space stations, this, that, and the other. He even managed to say a few words that sounded almost like gratitude.
“I guess giving you guys a chance to save my neck made a nice break in the routine for you, huh? Not much else exciting going on around here, is there?”
He talked so much and so fast that it never occurred to any of us, not even Zworkin, to ask why he had been flying so near to us. As far as I knew, there were no Western satellites in orbits this close to our station. Or there should not have been.
Next to his machine-gun monologue, the thing that impressed my men most about this American astronaut was his uniform. Like ours, it was basically a one-piece coverall, quite utilitarian. Like us, he bore a name patch over his left chest pocket. There the similarities ended.
Sam’s coveralls were festooned with all sorts of fancy patches and buttons. Not merely shoulder patches that showed the mission he was flying. He had patches and insignia running down both sleeves and across his torso, both front and back. Dragons, comic-book rocket ships, silhouettes of naked women, buttons that bore pictures of video stars, strange symbols and slogans that made no sense to me, such as “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here” and “King Kong died for our sins.”
Finally, I ordered my men back to their duties and told Sam to accompany me to the control center.
Zworkin objected. “It is not wise to allow him to see the control center,” he said in Russian.
“Would you prefer,” I countered, “that he be allowed to roam through the laboratories? Or perhaps visit the laser module?”
Most of my own crew were not allowed to enter the laser module. Only men with specific military clearance were permitted there. And most of the laboratories, of course, were testing systems that would one day be the heart of our Red Shield antimissile system. Even the diamond-manufacturing experiment was a Red Shield program, according to my mission orders.
Zworkin did not reply to my question. He merely glared at me sullenly. He had a sallow, pinched face that was blemished with acne—unusual for a man of his age. The crew joked, behind his back, that he was still a virgin.
“The visitor stays with me, Nikolai Nikolaivich,” I told him. “Where I can watch him.”
Unfortunately, I had to listen to Sam as well as watch him.
I ordered my communications technician to contact the NASA space station and allow Sam to tell them what had happened. Meanwhile, Zworkin reported again to ground control. It was not a simple matter to transfer Sam back to the NASA space station. First we had to apprise ground control of the situation, and they had to inform Moscow, where the American embassy and the International Astronautical Commission were duly briefed. Hours dragged by, and our work schedule became completely snarled.
I must admit, however, that Sam was a good guest. He handed out trinkets that he fished from the deep pockets of his coveralls. A miniature penknife to one of the men who had rescued him. A pocket computer to the other, programmed to play a dozen different games when it was connected to a display screen. A small, flat tin of rock candy. A Russian-English dictionary the size of your thumb.
That dictionary should have alerted my suspicions. But I confess that I was more concerned with getting this noise intrusion off my station and back where he belonged.
Sam stayed a day. Two days. Teleconferences crackled between Moscow and Washington, Moscow and Geneva, Washington and Geneva, ground control to our station, our station to the NASA station. Meanwhile, Sam had made himself at home and even started to learn how to tell jokes in Russian. He was particularly interested in dirty jokes, of course, being the kind of man he was. He began to peel off some of his patches and buttons that adorned his coveralls and hand them out as presents. My crewmen especially lusted after the pictures of beautiful video stars.
He had taken over the galley, where he was teaching my men how to play dice in zero gravity, when I finally got permission to send him back to the American station. Not an instant too soon, I thought.
Still dear old Mir 5 became suddenly very quiet and dreary once we had packed him off in one of our own reliable transfer craft. We returned to our tedious tasks and the damnable exercise machines. Men growled and sulked at each other. Months of boredom and hard work stretched ahead of us. I could feel the tension pulling at my crew. I felt it myself.
But not for long.
Less than a week later, Korolev again rousted me from my zipper bunk.
“He’s back! The American!”
This time, Sam did not pretend to need an emergency rescue. He had flown an orbital transfer vehicle to our station and matched orbit. His OTV was hovering a few hundred meters alongside us.
“Permission to come aboard?” His voice was unmistakable. “Unofficially?”
I glanced at Zworkin, who was of course right beside me in the command center. Strangely, Nikolai Nikolaivich nodded. Nothing is unofficial with him, I knew. Yet he did not object to the American making an “unofficial” visit.
I went to the docking chamber while Sam floated over to us. The air lock of his craft would not fit our docking mechanism, so he went EVA in his pressure suit and jetted over to us using his backpack maneuvering unit.
“I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d drop by for a minute,” Sam wisecracked once he got through our air lock and slid up the visor of his helmet.
“Why are you in this area?” Zworkin asked, eyes slitted in his pimpled face.
“To observe your laser tests,” replied Sam, grinning. “You guys don’t think our intelligence people don’t know what you’re up to, do you?”
“We are not testing lasers!”
“Not today, I know. Don’t worry about it, Ivan, I’m not spying on you, for Chrissakes.”
“My name is not Ivan!”
“I just came to thank you guys for saving my ass.” Sam turned slightly, his entire body pivoting weightlessly toward me. He reached into the pouches on the legs of his suit. “A couple of small tokens of my gratitude.”
He pulled out two black oblong boxes and handed them to me. Videocassettes.
“Latest Hollywood releases,” Sam explained. “With my thanks.”
In a few minutes he was gone. Zworkin insisted on looking at the videos before anyone else could see them. “Probably capitalist propaganda,” he grumbled.
I insisted on seeing them with him. I wasn’t going to let him keep them all for himself.
One of the videos was the very popular film Rocky XVIII, in which a geriatric former prizefighter is rejuvenated and gets out of his wheelchair to beat a nine-foot-tall robot for the heavyweight championship of the world.
“Disgusting,” spat Zworkin.
“But it will be good to show the crew how low the capitalists sink in their pursuit of money,” I said.
He gave me a sour look, but did not argue.
The second video was a rock musical that featured decadent music at extreme decibel levels, decadent youths wearing outlandish clothes and weird hairdos, and decadent young women wearing hardly any clothes at all.
“Definitely not for the crew to see,” said Zworkin. And none of us ever saw that video again. He kept it. But now and then I heard the music, faintly, from his private cubicle during the shifts when he was supposed to be sleeping. Mysteriously, his acne began to clear up.
Almost two weeks afterward, Sam popped up again. Again he asked permission to come aboard, claiming this time that he was on a routine inspection mission of a commsat in geosynchronous orbit and had planned his return to the NASA station to take him close to us. He was a remarkable pilot; that much I must admit.
“Got a couple more videos for you,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
Zworkin immediately okayed his visit. The rest of my crew, who had cheered the rejuvenated Rocky in his proletarian struggle against the stainless-steel symbol of Western imperialism (as we saw it), welcomed him aboard.
Sam stayed for a couple of hours. We fed him a meal of borscht, soysteak, and ice cream. With plenty of hot tea.
“That’s the best ice cream I’ve ever had!” Sam told me as we made our weightless way from the galley back to the docking chamber, where he had left his pressure suit.
“We get fresh shipments every week,” I said. “Our only luxury.”
“I never knew you guys had such great ice cream.” He was really marveling over it.
“Moscow is famous for its ice cream,” I replied.
With a shake of his head that made his whole body sway slightly, Sam admitted, “Boy, we got nothing like that back at the NASA station.”
“Would you like to take some back to your station?” I asked. Fool that I am, I did not realize that he had maneuvered me into making the offer.
“Gee, yeah,” he said, like a little boy.
I had one of the men pack him a container of ice cream while he struggled into his pressure suit. Zworkin was off screening the two new videos Sam had brought, so I did not bother him with the political question of offering a gift in return for Sam’s gift.
As he put the helmet over his head, Sam said to me in a low voice, “Each of those videotapes is a double feature.”
“A what?”
Leaning close to me, so that the technician in charge of the docking air lock could not hear, he whispered, “Play the tape backward at half speed, and you’ll see another whole video. But you look at it yourself first. Don’t let that sourball of a political officer see it, or he’ll confiscate them both.”
I felt puzzled, and my face must have shown it. Sam merely grinned, patted me on the shoulder, and said, “Thanks for the ice cream.”
Then he left.
It took a little ingenuity to figure out how to play the videos backward at half speed. It took even more cleverness to arrange to look at them in private, without Zworkin or any of the other crew members hanging over my shoulder. But I did it.
The “second feature” on each of the tapes was pornographic filth. Disgusting sexual acrobatics featuring beautiful women with large breasts and apparently insatiable appetites. I watched the degrading spectacles several times, despite stern warnings from my conscience. If I had been cursed with acne, these videos would undoubtedly have solved the problem. Especially the one with the trapeze.
For the first time since I had been a teenager buying contraband blue jeans, I faced a moral dilemma. Should I tell Zworkin about these secret pornographic films? He had seen only the normal, “regular” features on each tape: an ancient John Wayne Western and a brand-new comedy about a computer that takes over Wall Street.
In my own defense, I say only that I was thinking of the good of my crew when I made my decision. The men had been in orbit for nearly 650 days, with almost two full months to go before we could return to our loved ones. The pornographic films might help them to bear the loneliness and perform better at their tasks.
But only if Zworkin did not know about them.
I decided to chance it. One by one, I let the crew in on the little secret. Morale improved 600 percent. Performance and productivity rose equally. The men smiled and laughed a lot more. I told myself it was just as much because they were pulling one over on the puritanical Zworkin as because they were watching Oral Roberta and her buxom girlfriend Electric (AC/DC) Edna.
Sam returned twice more, swapping tapes for ice cream. He was our friend. He apparently had an inexhaustible supply of videos, each of them a “double feature.” While Zworkin spent the next few weeks happily watching the regular features on each video and perspiring every time he saw a girl in a bikini, the rest of us watched the adventures of airline stewardesses, movie starlets, models, housewife-hookers, and other assorted and sordid specimens of female depravity.
The days flew by, with each man counting the hours until Sam showed up with another few videos. We stopped eating ice cream so that we would have plenty to give him in return.
But then Sam sprang his trap on us. On me.
“Listen,” he said as he was suiting up in the docking chamber, preparing to leave. “Next time, how about sticking a couple of those diamonds you’re making into the ice cream.”
