Lights in the Deep (10 page)

“You’d be treated well,” I said. “I don’t know what you get told back in Star City, but whatever you think is going to happen to you in the States, it’s not. Probably the President will want you under wraps for a while, maybe debrief you a bit, but myself and the other guys, we’d stick up for you and make sure you got a fair shake. Even citizenship, if you want it.”

“You make it all sound easy, Malachi. Is not easy. I would be betrayer of Soviet people. But more important to me, I still would not fly.”

“Sounds to me like you’re grounded either way, so what’s the use in trying to go back to Russia?”

She looked up suddenly, an intense twinkle in her gaze.

“If landed in Russia—Black Sea—I could claim
you
as prisoner. You would be returned to your country, eventually. Like your spy pilot Powers. But I could retain flight status with Terashkova’s support.”

“And the Soviet Air Force gets to pick apart the Gemini,” I said ironically.

“Da.”

“What makes you think I see any advantage to that scenario?”

“Eh?”

“Why would I do that for you? I already saved your life. It’s you who owe me, not the other way around.”

“American selfishness,” Raisa snapped.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re not the only one with her ass in a crack.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the first black Astronaut is
not
losing his ship to the Soviet Union!”

We were both shocked by my sudden outburst.

“Look,” I said, “Back home, I’m like this big glaring signpost. What happens with me—what happens with this mission—it’s very important to a great many people. Dr. King, he pulled me aside and told me that the eyes of every colored man, woman, and child would be on the stars while I am up here. If I fail—if this mission fails—it will fuck up a lot of things. For more than just me.”

I could still remember the earnestness in Dr. King’s expression. He got shot dead a few weeks later.

Raisa’s eyes blinked once.

I drew a deep breath, collected myself, and continued.

“I don’t know what it’s like for a woman in Russia,” I said, “but you have no idea what it’s like to be a black man in America. No idea at all.”

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Perhaps my ass!”

“Amerikanyetz—Malachi—you are Christian, yes?”

“My parents are,” I said. Cheney and I hadn’t been to church since we lived in Chicago.

“Do you know my name? What it means to me?”

“I don’t understand,” I admitted.

“Jewish,” she said. “Mother and father. Both sent to the gulag by Comrade Stalin.”

I’d heard of the gulag and that the Communists weren’t especially friendly with Jews. But the look on Raisa’s face told me I clearly didn’t know the half of it.

“What happened to them?”

“Dead. Like all sent to Siberia. I was spared because I was sent to live with a step uncle, who was good Party member. The NKVD could not touch him, and he made sure I got into school. I even kept my name, though I have had to be careful. The Jew in Russia is the ‘nigger’ of Soviet Union.”

I wanted to tell her to go to hell—I hated hearing that word come off white lips.

But what could I say? It wasn’t like I could refute her.

“So you see, Amerikanyetz. Is not so easy for
either
of us. What shall we do?”

I stared at her for a long time, then turned away and looked back out the window at the growing disc of the Earth. From this altitude, it was amazing to see the globe as a whole—one giant ball, slowly spinning. No borders and no obvious signs even that humans lived there at all. Just giant blue oceans and vast white clouds, with mottled green and brown land masses, all crumpled together.

When the Mediterranean came into view, I sat up a little.

“Zaslavskaya,” I said. “Are there a lot of Russian Jews in Israel?”

“I know cousins and friends of Papa who fled south after the Great War.”

“Think you could figure out the math necessary to put us down somewhere near the Eastern Med?”

Raisa’s eyebrow arched at me.

“What is this thinking, Malachi?”

“Houston will never buy off on it. We’ll have to make it look like an accident.”

“We need
some
contact with ground, to confirm telemetry and trajectory.”

“Yes, but once we get our bearings, could we figure out an alternate trajectory on our own?”

Raisa looked at Vic’s book, now filled with her scribbling. “I was top of class, mathematics. Helped earn me slot with female Cosmonaut group.”

“Let’s hope so. Because once I cut radio to NASA, it’s all on us to get down where we want.”

• • •

We got ourselves straightened out on the fourth and final day. Had to burn a lot on the Chiron’s engines to square up for a Pacific splashdown with the carrier
Hornet.
Told Houston all about what had happened in lunar orbit—save for the discovery of the L3 and my new copilot. It would be better for both of us if they didn’t know—at least until after the boats from Tel Aviv picked us up. If they picked us up. We’d have no way of contacting anyone once we went radio silent—not without giving the game away. We’d have to assume that NASA would contact the Israelis and request assistance, once it was obvious where we might splash down. I made sure to throw in plenty of warnings about continued faults on the radio, and squelched the signal a few times for emphasis, to make it sound good.

Meanwhile, Raisa’s hands were a blur as she worked it all out by pencil. Her muttering was almost like a monk’s chanting as she went over and over her formulas, verifying and re-verifying her work. When she could, she used the Gemini’s computer—another piece of American technology for which she’d shown great fondness—and before I broke contact with Houston we had one final hear-to-heart about whether or not we could go through with it.

“Da,” she said firmly. “It will work, Malachi.”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want us coming down somewhere we don’t want to be. The Gemini is a water craft. It’s never been landed on the ground while a man was in it. And I don’t even want to think about what might happen if we screw up and come in over Libya or Egypt or some place like that.”

“Da, agreed. Would be bad for both of us.”

“That is a bona fide fact, lady.”

She stuck out her hand, without gloves. Her nails were trimmed to the quick, like a man’s, and her grip was strong. Yet the feel of her much-smaller fingers, and my brown mitt wrapped around hers, like a boxer’s, I was suddenly hit again by how odd it was being in orbit with a woman.

I killed the radio.

Per expectation, Houston began screaming.

Raisa and I ran the math again and again, concluding that it was as good as we both could make it, then we began the subtle, slow burn to slow us up and alter the de-orbit just enough to bring us down shorter than NASA planned.

Saying farewell to the Chiron, we decoupled and set it free. It had served us well.

Reentry was as hellish as Vic had said it would be. He’d been up on a Gemini mission before, during one of the Agena tests, and hadn’t been lying when he said that it felt like an elephant was standing on your chest. Outside the window the atmosphere had turned to flame, the friction causing a constant roar on the spacecraft’s heat shield. Raisa’s hands were balls of iron and her eyes were closed tightly as she spat unintelligible things to me in Russian. Prayers? Pleading? For all I knew she was singing, “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb…”

It was only a handful of minutes, to get from orbit to parachute deployment, but it felt like an eternity, during which we were fully blind and absolutely trusting our edumacated guesstimations.

When the chutes momentarily hesitated to deploy, I sent forth a stream of cursing, figuring that Vic’s accident had dealt us an unseen yet fatal blow. But when those orange-and-white stripes bloomed outside the window, and I felt our rapid fall to Earth cushioned gently by the rush of air into the fabric, I yelled with unrestrained glee and both Raisa and I clapped our gloved hands together and grinned at one another through the bowls of our helmets.

Radio was back, and I quickly scanned the bands that I knew we ought to be hearing, if there was anyone out there trying to talk to us.

A guttural language spat through static, and I looked at my partner, not sure whether to be happy or worried.

“Arabic?”

“No, Hebrew,” she said, nodding confidently.

I cleared my throat experimentally, then set our radio to broadcast.

“…Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Gemini Seventeen, broad-casting to all who can hear me…I say again, mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Gemini Seventeen, broadcasting. Assistance requested….”

• • •

Pickup went better than I could have hoped. The Israeli Air Force and Navy were waiting for us, though we’d landed well outside their nominal jurisdiction, in international waters. With the doors on the Gemini hanging open, we bobbed in the swells of the Med and enjoyed the miracle of warm, salty, fresh air, not a patch of land in sight. Compared to the
Hornet,
the Israeli Navy boat was a toy, but with IAF jets zooming overhead I felt curiously relaxed as the Israelis drew near and sent divers into the water. They brought a raft, which we happily fell into, and at once were barraged with questions by two frogsuited men speaking thickly-accented English.

They had expected one Astronaut, which told me that they’d been briefed by NASA, insofar as the events I’d been willing to divulge. The fact that Raisa was so clearly a Russian
and
a woman was cause for much excitement, which continued all the way to the boat, all the way back to port, and all the way to a secured debriefing at an IAF lockdown facility in Tel Aviv, where my last glimpse of Raisa was as she was herded down a hallway opposite from me, each of us still in our space undergarments and exchanging worried but grateful glances.

She waved stupidly, and I waved back, and then she was gone.

Forty eight hours later, I was getting off a U.S. Air Force plane in California, greeted by a pack of NASA officials who towed similar packs of military personnel and reporters. I kept my trap shut on the way from the plane to the waiting motorcade, bulbs flashing and popping and questions being screamed. Based on what I was being asked, it didn’t seem as if the mission was being considered such a failure after all. Not in the press anyway, which is perhaps what mattered most. For all concerned.

• • •

Ten years and a lifetime later, I was still at NASA. Vic’s death was hard on everyone, especially his family, but nobody blamed Astronaut Malachi Washington. It was a miracle I’d come down at all, just myself in a damaged ship—and no, they hadn’t gotten word about Raisa, not from the Israelis and certainly not from me. Which was fine. So far as I was concerned, this was one of those things that had happened in space, and was best kept in space. I’d made it back, I’d kissed my wife and kids, and life had gone on its merry way, hallelujah.

Nixon did get elected, and the USA did put men on the moon—before the Soviets, though they eventually got there too.

With the USSR working on a moon base, NASA had to work on a moon base too.

And with more flights going up from the Cape than ever before, there was plenty of work to go around. For all of us. So I stuck with it. Got on three flights. One of which culminated in my being able to spend a few days strolling around Mare Nectaris, as mission commander. Cheney and the kids and I were on TV a few times. I got to write and publish a book about my experience on Gemini 17, and dedicated it to Vic and used the royalties to help set up a memorial fund for Vic’s kids.

The Kennedy clan never did unseat Nixon, though there was muffled, unsubstantiated talk about some kind of scandal involving tapes and a hotel.

Cheney and I laughed pretty hard when Nixon’s successor—a Republican best known as a B movie actor—was elected in 1976. The old man was roundly hated by Jesse Jackson and the other Civil Rights crusaders from the Dr. King days. But Mr. Reagan seemed nice enough, and was all about celebrating the sacrifices of the veterans from the Vietnam and Cuban wars, many of whom had been my friends. So I thought well of Reagan. Especially after he assigned me as chief test pilot for his shuttle program that would be servicing the Skylab projects, One through Six.

I was doing face time at one of NASA’s combined NATO goodwill junkets in Germany when I heard a familiar voice say, “Amerikanyetz.”

I stopped dead in my tracks and turned around, my foam cup halfway to my mouth as she walked across the carpeted auditorium towards me. She was all business in those high heels, and a tinge of gray had touched her hair. But she smiled at me, an Israeli government group following her obediently; like a pack of puppies.

“Colonel Zaslavskaya,” said one of her aides, “this is Mr. Washington, formerly of the—”

“—United States Navy,” she said, extending a hand to me. I shook it, and suddenly the decade between us evaporated.

“NASA test pilot corps, at your service, ma’am,” I said, not quite believing.

“Gentlemen,” Raisa said to her entourage, “would you excuse us?”

The Israelis gave us room, going off to mingle with the many Houston and Cape eggheads who had come with me on this trip.

“You never told anyone the truth,” she whispered.

“Seemed better that way,” I said. “You’re still using the name, I see.”

“The Israelis treated me like a queen after we parted company. Made me an instant officer in the IAF. Said I was their key to keeping up with the rest of the West in space.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think, lump-head? I am here about your shuttle.”

“Oh.”

“Did they not tell you that your Reagan White House has requested that an Israeli pilot be sent, for the Skylab missions? As a show of solidarity with Israel?”

“No, they didn’t tell me that. Raisa…you don’t think the Soviets will care? I mean, I think they’d recognize one of their own, once the photographers and the newspapers got wind of this decision.”

“I am Israeli citizen now. Cosmonaut Zaslavskaya…she is dead. If the Soviets do want to complain, what can they do? Go to war for me? Their economy is stressed to the point of breaking, and they are being eaten alive in Afghanistan. I think I am a low priority for the Politburo.”