The Falling Astronauts

Book 98: Gateway Essentials

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

The space programme has finally lost its novelty, and a jaded public hardly notices another moon launch. Skilful PR men preserve the illusion that the missions have become routine. But astronaut Richard Martin can tell a different story. Of panic in deep space, of crewmen pushed beyond breaking point, of official indifference towards his own shattered life. Martin is effectively put under wraps - until the pilot of a moon capsule, loaded with nuclear weaponry goes beserk and a nightmare develops, threatening to engulf the world - a nightmare that only Martin could end.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 190

Sample

DOCKING MANEUVER: He feeds himself into her slowly, feeling the tentative hold, the slow, circling motions of orbit, anxious
to grasp, but fearful that if he does so the connection will be broken … and the other craft will dart off into space, squeaking
denial. So much, then, for inter-spatial hookups; so much for programming. Gentle, gentle, you fool, he cautions himself and tumbles into her fully, taking the small, winking clutch of her thighs as she eases him against her;
then he falls on top of her and begins the laborious instants of gathering. Connection.


Connection. Up and down, in and out, scatology moving in the foreground against a deeper, almost solemn hush. He begins to
talk to her in a high, level voice: persuasion, intimacy. “Come on,” he says, “come on now, faster,” hoping to wrench from
her by persuasion what he cannot by insistence, and slowly, slowly she opens underneath or perhaps it is only an image of
opening which seizes him. And in any event, it is too late. Mission destroyed. Control lost the linkage. We done blown a fuse
out here, gentlemen, hold for further instructions. Stay in your positions. Make no false adjustments.


And so he spills into her, gasping, broken, feeling her move away from him, feeling her cycle into a new trajectory, and he
does not know whether it is fulfillment or pain which causes him to topple from her so abruptly and lie beside, his eyes open
to the blankness of ceiling, his chest rising so unevenly that if he had not had such a close physical check so recently,
he would be doubtful of his heartbeat. He hears machinery: the tick of gears, whine of engines, clash of transmission and
hiss of static in the night-time air and from the far background he seems to hear a voice. Dedicated, low and monomaniacal,
the voice is telling him that he has, after all, performed his maneuvers well.


Machinery, the voice says with terrible reason. It’s all machinery. Think of yourself as an engine. Why worry about the work?
Do machines worry? Alpha, beta, delta, null. You really think too much already, kid.


“Fuck you,” the astronaut tells the voice, but then reconsiders, retreats. “Crazy,” he says instead, but only to himself.
“I’m crazy. I know that I’m crazy. Already. Please.” This is less an insight than a prayer, however, and so, without speaking,
he turns on his side, away from his wife, clutching the pillow as if it were space-gear, and counsels himself slowly into a
dark sleep, pierced with murmurs. His wife says nothing. Perhaps she had never awakened. He knows he will have to stop this.
There are limits to the woman.


Yes. Limits. If the obsession continues, he will have to talk openly with the psychiatric division, tell them the withheld
parts, and he does not know if he can take this. They will understand nothing, they only want to repair him. They do not want
to listen, nevertheless—if this does not stop—he will have to try. But now it is late, late at night and tired, and in the
spaces of his fatigue the astronaut can only think of her, his wife, as the tumbling craft, barely linked to him in the ether,
sliding toward the Moon as he holds against the fall and straddles his fear. He can not give in to this. He has higher obligations.
One must. Be. Responsible.


Presently, Richard Martin dreams, or thinks that he is dreaming. In this speculation, he is holding a press conference. Hundreds
of newsmen from the specialized publications as well as the major outlets are before him in a large conference room; behind
him sits the Public Relations Director, ready to assist if he falls into a snare but now, quiet, his hands clasped as if in
meditation. The Public Relations Director seems to be thinking of something else. Possibly he despises Martin but the personal
cannot enter into his kind of job. Martin has become very sensitive to reactions; he is aware of all of this.


The astronaut—Richard Martin—has not wanted to stand but one of the rules of the agency is that active personnel in the public
eye must show proper poise and physical condition at all times. (Thanks largely to him now, the appropriations situation is
touchier than ever and no lapses are tolerated.) He will not lose active status until his papers are processed; he is still
an instrument of the agency, a colonel in fact; he will be cooperative and he will stand. Nevertheless, Martin feels as if
he might collapse it; is only a neurasthenic reaction, of course, but were he to fall to the floor from a fainting weakness
of the ankles, how would this be explained to the press? Or would they care? Possibly some of them have had the experience
themselves, being overcome by gas at explosions or prostitutes at sex scandals.


“How does it feel?” a thin man with mad eyes asks to begin, “how do you feel to be out of the agency? Do you have any sense of loss? Do you feel somehow that your leaving under
these circumstances is an admission of failure? How can you circle the Moon and not two months later say that you feel too
old for space? It sounds pretty false to me. A fuller explanation if you will. The truth of this. We need it; we must enable
the public to understand.”


“Let me point out,” Martin says, hunching his shoulders, shaking his head, trying not to look at the man directly because
he knows that if he does he will be on the verge of a confrontation that he could not bear, “let me point out, as I say, this:
that I feel now to be the time for me to resign active duty because my particular usefulness to this project is at an end.
My place can be taken by any one of fifty or sixty qualified men, all of them capable of doing what I did with the same adequacy.
There was a time in the early days of the program where each man, because of his training, might have been irreplaceable or
at least very expensive, but that is no longer true. I don’t really think so. This is a big operation here now and I decided
that it was time for me to step out of the way and let one of the younger fellows have the chance.


“After all,” he says with what he hopes to be a disarming grin, “once you’ve seen space once, you’ve seen it fifty times.”

“You know something?” the mad-eyed reporter says, “you’re full of shit. You’re lying to us, Martin; that isn’t the reason
you quit at all. There’s nothing that would make any of you monkeys in the program quit except fear or mental illness or threats
and that’s what has happened here. It’s obvious. All of it. That’s what happened, you just caved in mister or colonel or whatever
the hell they call you and you owe it to us to lay it on the line. The nation demands! The nation must be served! We can no longer accept your public relations lies! The press is the last bastion of freedom and truth!”


“But that’s not true,” Martin says and notes that his voice seems to have broken. (There is precedent for that; let it not
worry him unduly.) “That’s simply not true; when we circled the Moon it was not fear which filled me because I knew fear well,
the whole sense of it, and had conquered that a long time ago. Fear is nothing. It was the isolation. Terror at the isolation,
terror at the maddening realization that all I had to do at any moment was push the button and make the escape fire, the pretty
flames of flight; oh God, the cunning knowledge that I could abandon the two bastards down there and no way that they could
ever be recovered and oh boy, the compulsion, the sense of imminence, it was all too much for me. Too much! You have no idea
of what we live through out there, the horrors of it!” he bellows … and lunges toward the tormenting news freak but before
he can go even two steps, the Public Relations Director has intervened, has put a hand on his shoulder, is guiding him gently
toward the podium, murmuring.


“Don’t listen to them,” he says, “there’s no reason to listen. They’re only wolves and all they want is a cheap, easy headline.
It isn’t personal. They don’t even know what’s going on,” the Director counsels, the Director of course being qualified on
every aspect of the program … and the scene seems to shift, then, there is a lapse of time, nothing being quite as it was
in any event and maybe it was not that way in the first place. A lady reporter with huge glasses and ascendant breasts is
demanding the female view of the space program. Specifically, what does his wife think of his resignation to say nothing of
the Mission? How long are women going to be excluded from the program except in the capacity of public relations wives who apparently have no passion? Was his wife the one to force him to resign? Did
he defer to her wishes? Does he believe in mutual orgasms and women’s rights in the bed? Does he remember having any feeling
for her at all as they passed over the craters or do the men really make dirty jokes off the audio?


“Her feelings are ambivalent,” Martin says carefully, pausing on the difficult word to get it out just right, am-bi-vay-lent. “Absolutely ambivalent you know. She’s hated this program you see from the very first and everything that it stood for too
and so on and so forth but then on the other hand she was pretty well kept under wraps like all of the women and she stood
by for a long, long time. But while she was standing by, whatever love she had for me ended. It curdled into something harder
and brighter and more desperate than love and struck me in the night … and all of this because I could not leave. How could
I leave? The investment was enormous and besides it was the only thing I knew. Something terrible would have to happen to
me to force me to go and by the time it came along there was no difference.


“We were one of the few families in the program without children, you see. That’s bad; it’s even easier for the bachelors
than childless couples because the bachelors can duck the whole social insanity but we were part of it and yet no part of
it. So she had nothing to do with the days, not really, and little in common with the other wives and all she wanted to do
was to get out of the life. That was the way she put it, ‘I want to get out of the life, Richard; I can’t take this.’ But
she couldn’t. How could she? And by that time, anything that we might have had was all gone to pieces until we were living
with just the broken furniture of a marriage, that was her way of putting it, but we couldn’t get evicted because that wasn’t part of the program either. I know I’m not phrasing this too well but
I want to be fair to her. Let me get to the point: we lived past hatred, you see, past everything but revulsion and fatigue
and by the time I had the thing happen to me so that I could get out, it didn’t matter anymore. It made no difference. What
I’m trying to say is that she really doesn’t care and probably she’s going to leave me almost any time. I’d like to give you
the women’s point of view somewhat better on this but I can’t, you see. I simply can’t; I don’t understand it. I think the
problem is that women have nothing to do with this.”


“That is quite interesting,” says a short, vacant faced man who seems to be from the Journalistic Sun, “and we appreciate that information but you’re really rambling quite a bit, colonel, and you’ve managed to stray away completely
from the basic point of the matter. Let’s stick to business if we can. Why did you want to desert those men? What would that
have accomplished? Do you think your mental state was unbalanced at that time or was it something that the conditions could
have done to anyone at all if they were in your position? Give me a straight answer, please. We’ve been following this program
for almost two decades and if you gave one it would set a precedent.”


“No,” Martin says, “no, no, I didn’t want to desert them. I didn’t want to, I mean, it was just the perversity of the thought that drove me mad, you see. That I would even think such a thing, after all the training and so on; they never even gave
you an indication that this kind of thing might happen to you if you got out there alone in the control capsule—”


“Oh come on,” the reporter says, “we don’t have the time anymore. Time is running too short on all of us now and besides, friend, we’re private industry. We have to justify our time to get ourselves fired. Now listen to me: you
wanted to do it, you wanted to desert them and you would have done it if you hadn’t lacked the guts. You’re crazy, do you
know that, space monkey? You’re crazy, man. They would put you into an insane asylum and take out your frontal lobes except
that the press would kill the program, they’d feed all that stuff out and the craziness would kill everything, now astronauts
going crazy and trying to desert, they would say, and so much for the space program. This is a nice easy cover instead. Isn’t
that true, rover boy? They’re going to pension you out nice and slow and you might even get a desk job after this but you
listen to me you twitching son of a bitch, there is absolutely no hope for you because you wanted—”


“I didn’t!” the astronaut cries, “I didn’t!” and lunges toward the newspaperman … but once again his charge is broken by the
Public Relations Director, whose grasp this time is much firmer and he is saying, “That is it, that’s it, this press conference
is over, it is now over I tell you,” while the reporters run in various directions, some toward the exits and some toward
the astronaut and he feels that they are about to overwhelm him. He does not know precisely what he will be able to do in
order to protect himself but as he feels the impact of the bodies pressing against him, he suspects that it may be something
violent. A dark anger tears through him and he flings an arm, mutters something, coils his body for what could only be an
attack but at the last instant, right before disaster, that is, the Director seizes him by an elbow and says, “Come on, come
on now, just forget it; they’re doing a job like anyone else and anyway there isn’t a word of truth in it because you loved
those men and wouldn’t have hurt them for anything in the world. We know it. We know it.”


Martin turns toward the Director to see if there is irony in his face but as he does so, the face changes and becomes the
slick pan of the computer feeding out the tapes to him, the fucking—


—Tapes that tell him exactly what to do and where to go, put them in the controls and let them guide the ship, who needs them
anymore? and he cannot take this. Cannot take it. He finds that he is on the ship again and the face has become the computer
and information is now battering him: an overload of information about courses and trajectories and fuel consumption and so
on. Back to the damned ship again! when he thought that was all behind him forever and as he turns from the computer in horror
he sees that his companions are there. They are lying weightless, drifting in space, their eyes winking and he hates them.
Oh, how he hates them! Now for the first time he feels that he can tell them so but as he holds his mouth ready to shout threats
they begin to laugh. They laugh at him madly because they will be the ones to explore the Moon while he, the inadequate Richard
Martin, will remain on the ship and this laughter destroys him. It absolutely rips him to shreds and he feels himself imploding,
falling to pieces on the ship, the dim throb of the support systems unable to separate his flesh from the stink, oh God, there
is so much space but there is too little space: how will he ever get away from them? How?


He waits for the scene to change again,. . .