They were solidly built men, all four of them. Short and thickset. Like Jamie himself, although the Russians were much lighter in complexion than Jamie’s half-Navajo skin.
“Is this official business?” he had asked them when they pounded on his hotel door at the crack of dawn.
“No business,” Zavgorodny had replied while the other three grinned broadly. “Pleasure. Fun.”
Fun for them, maybe, Jamie grumbled to himself as the car hummed along the concrete of the empty highway. The river curved off to their left. The wind carried the smell of sun-baked dust. The old town of Tyuratam and Leninsk, the new city built for the space engineers and cosmonauts, was miles behind them now.
“Why are we going to an airport?” Jamie asked.
The one on his right side laughed aloud. “For fun. You will see.”
“Yes,” said the one on his left. “For much fun.”
Jamie had been a Mars trainee for little more than six months. This was his first trip to Russia—to Kazakhstan, really—although his schedule had already whisked him to Australia, Alaska, French Guiana, and Spain. There had been endless physical examinations, tests of his reflexes, his strength, his eyesight, his judgment. They had probed his teeth and pronounced them in excellent shape, then sliced his appendix out of him.
And now a quartet of cosmonauts he’d never met before was taking him in the early morning hours of a quiet Sunday for a drive to Outer Nowhere, Kazakhstan.
For much fun.
There had been precious little fun in the training for Mars. A lot of competition among the scientists, since only sixteen would eventually make the flight: sixteen out of more than two hundred trainees. Jamie realized that the competition must be equally fierce among the cosmonauts and astronauts.
“Have you all had your appendixes removed?” he asked.
The grins faded. The cosmonaut beside him answered, “No. Is not necessary. We do not go to Mars.”
“You’re not going?”
“We are instructors,” Zavgorodny said over his shoulder. “We have already been turned down for the flight mission.”
Jamie wanted to ask why, but he thought better of it. This was not a pleasant topic of conversation.
“Your appendix?” asked the man on his left. He ran a finger across his throat.
Jamie nodded. “They took the stitches out yesterday.” He realized it had actually been Friday in Bethesda and now it was Sunday, but it felt like yesterday.
“You are an American Indian?”
“Half Navajo.”
“The other half?”
“Anglo,” said Jamie. He saw that the word meant nothing to the Russians. “White. English.”
The man sitting up front beside Zavgorodny turned to face him. “When they took out your appendix—you had a medicine man with painted face to rattle gourds over you?”
All four of the Russians burst into uproarious laughter. The car swerved on the empty highway, Zavgorodny laughed so hard.
Jamie made himself grin back at them. “No, I had anesthesia, just as you would.”
The Russians chattered among themselves. Jamie got a vision of jokes about Indians, maybe about a red man wanting to go to the red planet. There was no nastiness in it, he felt, just four beer-drinking fliers having some fun with a new acquaintance.
Wish I understood Russian, he said to himself. Wish I knew what these four clowns are up to. Much fun.
Then he remembered that none of these men could even hope to get to Mars anymore. They had been relegated to the role of instructors. He thought to himself, I’ve still got a chance to make the mission. Do they hold that against me? Just what in the hell are they planning to do?
Zavgorodny swung the car off the main highway and down a two-lane dirt road that paralleled a tall wire fence. Jamie could see, far in the distance, hangars and planes parked haphazardly. So we really are going to an airport, he realized.
They drove through an unguarded gate and out to a far corner of the sprawling, silent airport where a single small hangar stood all by itself, like an outcast or an afterthought. A high-wing, twin-engine plane sat on squat tricycle landing gear on the concrete apron in front of the hangar. To Jamie it looked like a Russian version of a Twin Otter, a plane he had flown in during his week’s stint in Alaska’s frigid Brooks Range.
“You like to fly?” Zavgorodny asked as they piled out of the car.
Jamie stretched his arms and back, glad to be no longer squeezed into the car’s back seat. It was not even nine o’clock yet, but the sunshine felt hot and good as it baked into his shoulders.
“I enjoy flying,” he said. “I don’t have a pilot’s license, though. I’m not qualified—”
Zavgorodny laughed. “Good thing! We are four pilots. That is three too many.”
The four cosmonauts were already wearing one-piece flight suits of faded, well-worn tan. Jamie had pulled on a white short-sleeved knit shirt and a pair of denims when they had roused him from his hotel bed. He followed the others into the sudden, cool darkness of the hangar. It smelled of machine oil and gasoline. Two of the cosmonauts went clattering up a flight of metal stairs to an office perched on the catwalk above.
Zavgorodny beckoned Jamie to a long table where a row of parachute packs sat big and lumpy, with straps spread out like the limp arms of octopi.
“We must all wear parachutes,” Zavgorodny said. “Regulations.”
“To fly in that?” Jamie jabbed a thumb toward the plane.
“Yes. Military plane. Regulations. Must wear chutes.”
Zavgorodny picked up one of the cumbersome chute packs and handed it to Jamie like a laborer passing a sack of cement.
“Where are we flying to?” Jamie asked.
“A surprise,” the Russian said. “You will see.”
“Much fun,” said the other cosmonaut, already buckling the groin straps of his chute.
Much fun for
