The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (Apollo Quartet) by Ian Sales Page B

though it’s painful. It feels like the pain is deserved.
    Crossfield has loaded up the landing program, Finley says as he returns to the hatch; You shouldn’t have to do anything.
    Thanks, says Elliott.
    There’s also a radio with the food and water and oxygen in the Lower Equipment Bay. You’ll not want to wear your spacesuit down there, it’s pretty damn hot.
    They told me to pack some light clothes, Elliott replies.
    Finley laughs. Yeah, he says, Light clothes. He has reached the hatch. He exits, turns about and peers back in. If you want, he says, we can parachute you down an Atlas V. It’s no good to you without a launch pad but, hell, we got boosters to spare.
    Elliott shakes his head. If I need one, he replies, I’ll let you know. Let me see what it’s like on the ground first.
    Fair enough, Finley says. He pauses a moment, and then adds, Godspeed. If you find them, it could be one day I can say I met the first man to meet aliens.
    Even if I don’t find them, says Elliott, you can still tell people that and it’ll be true.
     
     
    1981
    In Moscow, the First Man on Mars meets the First Man on the Moon. They shake hands and exchange pleasantries through interpreters for the watching dignitaries and press. Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov is courteous but guarded. Later, over vodka and caviar, through an English-speaking comrade, Leonov confesses that the lunar landing instruments in his LK threw a persistent error.
    I make manual landing, he tells Elliott.
    Elliott wonders what would have happened if Leonov had aborted and Armstrong had not. An American would have been the First Man on the Moon.
    He toasts the Soviet cosmonaut, and glances across the room at his wife. Judy is speaking to a handsome and well-dressed woman with carefully-coiffured brown hair. It is a moment before he identifies her as Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
    And over there, Bob Walker is talking—via an interpreter—to Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov, the LOK pilot for the second Soviet lunar landing. Bob’s wife, Valerie, is by his side, one arm hooked through his.
    This world tour has been hard, but it has been good for the Elliott marriage. The Ares programme almost killed it. Days smiling for the camera, pills every night or she could not sleep. She came so very close to walking away; she has made that abundantly clear to him.
    But travelling about the world, parades in every major city, meeting important people, seeing the sights: it’s been… fun. The interminable receptions and banquets, the endless parade of self-important faces—perhaps not. But in the moments they’ve stolen from their busy schedule, they have rediscovered each other.
    They have visited Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Oslo, West Berlin, London, Rome, Ankara, Kinshasa, and now Moscow. It has been hectic but at least they are travelling in style: the President has lent them one of his Boeing VC-137C airliners. Elliott refers to it jokingly as “Air Force One”, though it uses that callsign only if the President is aboard.
    Elliott feels profoundly grateful, and not just to the President and NASA. He’s not only lucky to be here, he’s lucky to be alive— No, not luck. It wasn’t luck that got him back to the Mars Module after he broke the wheel on the MRV. He did it himself. He was on reserve air by the time he reached the MM, and he spent his last day on Mars too tired and in too much pain to do anything but lie in his hammock. Then there was the 537-day free-return trip to Earth—and once the high from reaching Mars had gone and the boredom set in, he and Walker carefully avoiding each other, trying to find a way to live together in such close confines during those long days drifting through the lifeless dark, conflicted by disappointment at the mission’s imminent end and a yearning for home and an end to this limitless night…
    Re-entry. Splashdown. Lying in their seats unable to cope with Earth