AMERICA ONE (32 page)

“How much Russian vodka do you think is up there?” Ryan asked the scientist who smiled back at Ryan.

“When I ordered the last team to close up the control module nearly twenty years ago, they were ordered to take everything. I know cosmonauts well, and they would have each left something behind as a token; it’s a Russian custom to leave something for the next person. I would say at least one bottle, plus some frozen food packs, maybe even a few cans of frozen caviar, you never know,” he smiled again and left.

For Ryan, this was the very beginning. He had already won the space race, taking humans up to connect with another space craft. It would have won him the prize. The prize was the same amount he spent every week on his program.

Now that his first two astronauts were up there, he had little to do for the rest of the day, and decided to take his Audi for a spin for the first time in more than a month.

He drove out of the gate remembering that the next shipment of three aluminum cylinders, each on a tractor-trailer, were due in the next day.

Maggie had really grown to like that gruff SOB Mr. Jones over the last couple of months. He might have a big mouth, but he was as good a pilot as he said he was, and now he was up there with very little to do for the next month. At least he was out of harm’s way, or was he? The idea of going to space excited her and frightened her at the same time.

She remembered her younger days with her parents. Often she lay on the hammock in the garden during the summer nights watching for meteors. Now she was going to live among them; in a cold and uninhabitable place. This was one of the reasons she knew that Jonesy was a mental prop for her. At least they could continue their affair up there, without military personnel spying, or trying to find out what she was doing in her private life. Most of the men she had thought of as possible suitors in her career had been good married men; the others seemed to be lousy SOBs who had a grudge against everything. She found it weird how men acted in the Air Force. They all became little gods as they rose in rank, thinking they were supreme beings after having more and more personnel salute them, and treat them with respect.

She was impressed with many of Ryan’s inner scientists, and got on well with them. Some of these people were fantastically smart, far smarter than many in the military. Many of the older scientists only lived for their work, and beyond work disappeared into groups, playing chess, or taking walks around the runway they ran around three times a week. Everyone on the base was healthy in mind and body. The food was good, the exercise a healthy alternative to sitting in front of a computer every day, and Maggie Sinclair began to really feel at home for the first time since she had left the Air Force Academy in Colorado, a place she had loved. She cried when she was posted out.

Michael Pitt and Penny Sullivan were also happy. They also had a little thing going on the side. Again, the Air Force had halted both of their chances of finding a mate, and now it was bliss; enjoying a passion for flying with someone special who shared the same interests.

Ryan didn’t miss a thing. There was nothing that went on around his airfield without his knowing about it. However, he was a little jealous of the blossoming relationship between his favorite girl and VIN.

Suzi. He had a real soft spot for her. He didn’t mind that she needed a wheelchair; her character was so strong that one forgot about the chair when she smiled at you and her eyes sparkled.

Ryan was never a womanizer. He had been so busy creating ideas that he often forgot to go out and socialize for months at a time. He could remember only two girls he would have married; the first, in high school, a girl so pretty that he automatically fell in love with her at first sight. Unfortunately, she was the girlfriend of the school’s biggest linebacker, and he wasn’t a guy to mess with.

He did hear that she dropped him a year or so later after the linebacker never made the big leagues and began drinking heavily. By this time he was on the other side of the country, but often thought about driving back to see if she would marry him.

The second girl was a girl at MIT. She reminded him of his first love at high school, and turned out not to be interested in men. She had forthrightly told him that after several dates, exactly at the time he thought appropriate for a first kiss.

That had ended his love life. Sure there were girls willing to do anything for his money. He could see them coming a mile away and took advantage of their willingness on occasion. But, Suzi had ignited his interest on a ski holiday in the Bavarian Alps years earlier. Yes, she had legs then, sexy long ski legs, and he spent a month taking ski lesson after lesson with her. She was at university, and also worked as a ski instructor in the Bavarian ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen whenever she had a month, or a week free.

He became so good at skiing that she refused to teach him anymore, also stating kindly that she needed to get back to her studies in Munich.

Ryan didn’t see her again for several years, until one day she listened to a lecture of his in Berlin, and she came up in her wheelchair to introduce herself to him. After the initial shock of seeing her crippled had worn off, she suggested a beer or three, just like their old times after skiing. He gladly accepted, and they caught up with each other’s life, he offering her a job in the United States, starting the next year. Suzi happily accepted.

Suzi had struggled after her autobahn accident. It had been a foggy day driving the 90-odd kilometers from Garmich to Munich. She had just finished her final year and was returning to clear out her belongings from her Munich apartment. She was about to go to Berlin to begin her Masters in microbiology at the university there, when her Porsche had been rear-ended in a pile up. She wasn’t going the usual 120 miles an hour, but a sedate 85 for the misty conditions when the dark gray shapes of motor vehicles suddenly appeared out of the fog in front of her. A few seconds of hard braking probably saved her life. There had been no warning on the radio and she was still in one piece when her car came to a grinding, crashing halt, but her car was immediately struck hard repeatedly by several other cars that came behind her.

Minutes later the fog slowly lifted, and the carnage could be seen. Over forty cars had been destroyed and several people killed.

She stayed in the Munich hospital for months; her spine had been fractured in the extreme lower vertebrae area. All three doctors attending her said she would never walk again.

Suzi got used to the idea. The state paid for all of her hospitalization, including a wheelchair and a used wheelchair-accessible Volkswagen Kombi to get around.

Ryan drove slowly. He didn’t want to get a ticket at this time of his life as he drove into Las Vegas. He drove up and down the strip a couple of times with the odd young girl waving at him, and then he drove back, reaching the airfield just before dark.

Jonesy shared the half-f bottle with his partner. VIN checked that the sensors were registering readings inside the “beer can”.

“Jonesy, that hulk of metal out there doesn’t look anything like a darn beer can.”

“It looks more like a beer can than a vodka bottle,” replied Jonesy, both men a little the worse off after the vodka had melted.

Earlier, they had taken off their space suits, tied themselves into the pilots’ seats, turned on the CD player, grabbed a pouch of what astronauts called “food” and looked out into space at earth floating past beneath them.

With Frank Sinatra loudly blaring out one of his most famous hits, they toasted each other, passing the floating bottle back and forth with a finger always atop the neck of the bottle, making sure that the floating liquid inside the weightless bottle didn’t escape.

They fell asleep in their chairs, exhausted and as intoxicated as one could get in space. Frank Sinatra also gave up thirty minutes later, and there was silence once again in the outer universe.

After nine hours, refreshed from a weird, floating sort of sleep, both men were awakened by a computer alarm beeping. Since they were not allowed to communicate from the shuttle to the outside, nobody was around to wake them. Jonesy checked over the shuttle controls, as he had done every few hours while the kid slept. Nothing much changed, except that for a couple of hours, they were in sunshine, and then darkness as the earth revolved between them and the sun.

“I wonder why we have to stay up here for a whole month,” VIN wondered, stretching. “I hope they have an exercise machine up here.”

“I remember Ryan saying that there was an exercise bike or something. It seems that the old beer can has more room in it than this little space.” Jonesy looked over the dials and checked his notes on what was a habitable environment. Both men were not scientists, just pilots, and all this was new territory to them.

“Beer can’s temperature 10 degrees on the plus side this time, toasty! Nitrogen 78 percent, oxygen 12 percent, carbon dioxide 1 percent. It looks like we are still here for another twelve hours,” Jonesy stated. “Let’s eat some of those pouch things, I like the orange juice one, also the chicken in vegetable soup, it tastes like soap, but I doubt there are any diners up here we can just pull the beer can up to. Hey! I know, kid! We could follow the International Space Station, say we are angels from heaven or something, and see if they are serving bacon and eggs for breakfast. I would even accept the crappy Air Force powdered eggs we used to get. Kid, I think we are going to starve to death up here.”

After six hours of listening to Sinatra in the background, and watching
Top Gun
on his Microsoft Surface for the umpteenth time in his life, VIN couldn’t take the Sinatra anymore and checked the wireless sensors from the space station. The readouts were better; temperature 20 degrees Celsius. He checked to see what that was in Fahrenheit; 68 degrees. The nitrogen had balanced out earlier at 78 percent, the oxygen was now 19 percent and the carbon dioxide was just less than one percent. What was important to VIN was that the inside air pressure showed 97 kPa (kilopascals), four kilopascals below normal air pressure at sea level.

“I’m going in,” shouted VIN. “Can you turn off the music? It’s too loud. It should be OK in there. Jonesy, help me to get my helmet on again, and I’ll bring you back a bottle of Vodka.”

“There’s another one?” Jonesy asked looking like a dog about to get a bone.

“It’s half the amount of the last one we drank last night. We could have it for dinner tonight,” suggested VIN.

“Of course, kid, you just tell me when the sun sets around here, and we can call it five o’clock somewhere. Its darn five o’ clock around here about three times a day! Yeh! I‘ll look for some Jimmy Buffett on the music system, we can celebrate five o’clock with him on the next round.”

Jonesy helped VIN on with his suit, which took an hour, and then he climbed through the inner hatch. The middle hatches were opened and the lights stayed green this time. The same happened when he opened the inner hatch into the space station and sailed in. It was brightly lit this time by LED lights in the command module as well as several in the hallway on the other side of the hatch he had purposely left open.

All of the inner hatches in the space station were still open as he had left them. Two were to his right with bright lights in them, as well.

First, he checked the module controls. The readouts looked the same as in the shuttle and he checked the cool-box for the promised bottle of vodka. He was surprised to see it was still frozen, just as he had left it, and was impressed with the cool-box, or freezer. Maybe the cosmonauts had left the stuff in this unit knowing that it would be the best place for the liquid and bottle to survive.

VIN then checked further down into the freezer, or whatever it was, and was rather surprised to see more bottles standing upright below the upper bottles; six full bottles of vodka! He pulled them out one by one and inspected each one. Then he tallied up their month’s stash of Russian liquor; six full bottles, one half and one a quarter full.

Smiling to himself, VIN decided not to tell Jonesy about this treasure just yet, and looked even further down into the square eighteen-inch unit. He pulled out jars of some black stuff with red labels
. “What is black, Russian and comes in small jars?
” he thought to himself. Then he remembered Christmas Eve;
“All the Russians received these same jars of eggs, fish eggs, caviar they called it. That’s right! Russian caviar! Yummy!”

He had tried the fish eggs at Christmas; Suzi had shown him how to eat them. They looked like little black squishy balls, which they put on a cracker. After getting used to the interesting taste, he enjoyed the tiny black balls. He told Suzi that they tasted like salt. A drunken Jonesy sitting next to him warned him that those eggs could kill non-Russians, and looked away when he tried them.
“Yes! These are all for me!”
he thought.

VIN searched further down and found flat pouch-like packets of something, described in Russian.
“Could be that Russian soup stuff,”
he thought to himself. “Twelve jars of the black caviar and twelve bags of soup stuff.” He suddenly felt like he had hit the Powerball lottery.

That was it; he replaced everything carefully, strapped down the quarter-f bottle for Jonesy in the command chair, and shut the cold- box.

It was time to check out the rest of the craft, so he floated out through the command center’s open hatch, and into the long round hallway. It was surprising how much equipment was in the walls of the hallway. He saw a couple of foldout tables and chairs. There was several supply cylinders of what looked like liquid gas. It was all in Russian. He floated into the open first sleeping chamber directly in front of him. There was nothing floating in the room, except three upright sleeping bags, and a space toilet/shower type system in an enclosed corner behind a privacy metal door. There was no hatch to the second room, so he returned to the hallway and floated into the second hatch further down.

The second room was exactly the same as the first. Then he floated into the end hatch, leaving the others open. This room, three times the size of the sleeping chambers, was the same width as the hallway, just not as long. His diagram on Jonesy’s plastic sheet, showed in translated English a work/relaxation/exercise room. He was happy to see large comfortable looking captain’s chairs with tie downs next to desks, a softer type twin chair with straps to tie yourself down, and in the corner an exercise bike secured to the wall, much like many he had used on earth. The only difference was the bike was at a ninety degree to the “floor” having straps everywhere so the person riding it would stay on the bike and not float off.