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paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or
perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision. You see, Americans,
he said silently, you really should have tried to join us here in our glorious
future, here in Kosmograd.
"Who would want to live in something like that?"
Stoiko asked, punching Grishkin's shoulder and laugh-
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ing with the quiet energy of desperation.
"You're joking," said Yefremov. "Surely we're all in enough trouble as it is."
"We're not joking, Political Officer Yefremov, and these are our demands." The
five dissidents had crowded into the Salyut the man shared with Valentina,
backing him against the aft screen. The screen was deco-
rated with a meticulously airbrushed photograph of the premier, who was waving
from the back of a tractor.
Valentina, Korolev knew, would be in the museum now with Romanenko, making the
straps. creak. The colonel wondered how Romanenko so regularly managed to
avoid his duty shifts in the gun room.
Yefremov shrugged. He glanced down the list of demands. "The Plumber must
remain in custody. I have direct orders. As for the rest of this document "
`-`You are guilty of unauthorized use of psychiatric drugs!" Grishkin shouted.
"That was entirely a private matter," said Yefre-
may calmly.
"A criminal act," said Tatiana.
"Pilot Tatjana, we both know that Grishkin here is the station's most active
samisdata pirate! We are all criminals, don't you see? That's the beauty of
our system, isn't it?" His sudden, twisted smile was shock-
ingly cynical. "Kosmograd is not the Potemkin, and you are not
revolutionaries. And you demand to com-
municate with Marshal Gubarev? He is in custody at
Baikonur. And you demand to communicate with the minister of technology? The
minister is leading the purge." With a decisive gesture he ripped the printout
to pieces, scraps of yellow flimsy scattering in free fall like slow-motion
butterflies.
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
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt (42 of 105) [1/14/03 11:20:24
PM]
file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Burning%20Chrome.txt 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
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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- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]