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Bedtime Stories

“So where is Andromeda today?” Yurii asked, as he floated just outside Sergei’s kayuta, continuing a story begun long ago.

“We’re in orbit around a black hole,” Sergei told him. Sergei had settled half-into his sleeping bag. “It’s a star that went supernova a long time ago and destroyed all life in its solar system.”

“Another dead world,” groaned Yurii. “Can’t we go somewhere where there’s living aliens? Female aliens?”

“We did that last time. So, we report back to Moskva through the wormhole gateway that the Soviet star ship Andromeda has discovered the remains of an ancient alien civilization, and they respond that we are to deploy a shuttle to the surface to explore it. We put on our black spacesuits and board the shuttle ….”

“Who’s coming this time?”

“Oh, all the usual suspects – me, you, Temyusha, Volodya, Andrusha, Joe ….”

“With you in charge, of course.”

“I am the ship’s commander! So, we land on the surface and disembark. We can see the black hole in the sky, and gas is being sucked into it from the other star orbiting it.”

“I thought there was one star?”

“Well, it’s two – a double star. There is no atmosphere and the sky is black, and you can see the rest of the Galaxy, a spiral across the sky. There’s the ruins of ancient buildings nearby, and these are black, also. There’s a feeling of evil all around. Then we see a bluish light shining out from the doorway of a huge building like a pyramid ….”

“And of course we have to go in.”

“Da, and when we do, we see all these paintings on the walls, like the ones the ancient Egyptians did,” Sergei went on, warming to his theme, “and then we enter a huge hallway with a roof a kilometer high. We have to cross a narrow bridge in single file over an abyss so deep that you can see all the way down to molten lava at the planet’s core. In the middle of the hall on a plateau is this black sarcophagus, surrounded by a glowing blue light. This is the source of the evil. There are hieroglyphics all around the sarcophagus and you, Yura, use the translator device to decipher them. It tells how the Dark Lord Nadelran –”

“Kto?”

“Oh, I just made that up. Anyway, Nadelran was the evil brother of, uh, Adelstan, the ruler of their world, and Nadelran plotted to destroy him so he could take power. There was this big war, and the forces they released were so great that one of their suns was destroyed, and so was their civilization. Adelstan managed to defeat his brother and imprisoned him for eternity in the sarcophagus before he and the other survivors departed for another star system in their space ships.”

“Cool! So where do they go – Afghanistan?”

“Oh, very funny. You’ll have to wait till next time!” Sergei yawned sleepily. They had been entertaining each other with the adventures of the Soviet star ship Andromeda since late childhood, though this had mostly ceased after they reached adulthood due to their careers taking precedence. The isolation and deprivation of life on the ISS, though, seemed to have brought back a need for such fantasizing. There was a frustrating disparity between these tales of gallivanting around the Universe and the reality of being unable to escape from low-Earth orbit (beyond which no Russian had yet gone). Both had grown up on a diet of military and science fiction books and movies, and derived plots from these. They envisioned the Andromeda as a massive black ship emblazoned with the red Soviet star and flag, the emissary of an empire that was now-defunct in the real world, though it still continued in their imaginations, at least.

Other times, they would exchange tales from their earlier lives and careers.

They had discussed letting Joe in on their adventures, but they doubted he would share their sentiments, so Sergei just included him in Andromeda’s crew (not as commander, of course) as a token gesture – Joe was an American emissary.

Joe, who had been responding to e-mails on his laptop – one from his elderly parents, another from his Russian lady friend Ol’ga (or Olya, as she told him to call her) – glanced right at the pair from his kayuta, wondering what his Russian crewmates were whispering about, as he had heard his name mentioned a couple of times. Conspiring to mutiny, maybe?

He turned back to his reply to Ol’ga. Her English was better than his Russian, and she sometimes sent him some very explicit e-mails, to which Joe replied in kind – he, like his crewmates, sometimes felt frustrated by the lack of female company. He thought he had sworn off women permanently after his troubled marriage to, and divorce from, Kelly (the ex-wife from Hell). The pair had gone through an acrimonious divorce during Joe’s Expedition Crew training, Kelly complaining that Joe loved his work more than her. She had thus had an affair and had taken off with her lover. The judge had awarded in her favor as she had claimed Joe had been abusive towards her. A wearily familiar drama that was a staple of bad soap operas, but still a shock when it happened to oneself. “Never, ever get married,” Joe bitterly advised his crewmates once, during training. “Women are more trouble than they’re worth.” (Being dedicated bachelors, the pair had no intention of marrying as they liked their freedom.) At least he’d not had children.

He had been charmed by the petite Russian flight controller during his training at Zvyozdyi Gorodok, known as Star City to Westerners. She was a couple of years older than he, with short reddish-brown hair, and also divorced (her former husband had been an alcoholic). I hope no one else reads these, thought Joe, blushing at the prospect. E-mails were supposed to be private – but how do I know? During their training, he had asked Yurii how he could encode secret e-mail messages along with a routine one. Yurii had given him a small program which enabled Joe to encode a message as a photo attached to an e-mail – another program on the receiver’s end then unscrambled the attached picture to receive the hidden message. Joe had given a copy of this program to Ol’ga so that they could exchange these messages without Houston’s knowing. Yurii and Sergei used the same program with their friends.

None of Joe’s fellow astronauts knew of this, of course, or of his still-secret romance. I’ve been tormented by them enough already.

Finishing the e-mail, he clicked on the Send icon. The e-mail and attachment would be sent in a packet with others at the next downlink, relayed to the White Sands Ground Terminal Complex, then to the secure servers at JSC and outwards through the firewall to their destinations via the public e-mail system.

He reached for a paperback novel he had brought along with him; a Dale Brown military aviation thriller. He mostly read books of that sort, along with Louis L’Amour Westerns. This particular novel featured the Russians as villains, as did many of Dale Brown’s novels – he seemed to still have a grudge against them. I should give one to Sergei to read, Joe thought. It would annoy him like nothing else. He recalled Sergei’s reaction one evening when watching a scene in the movie Air Force One on the Station’s portable DVD player, where a rogue element of the Russian Air Force in MiG-29s attacked the U.S. President’s 747, but were tackled by F-15s coming to Air Force One’s rescue. The Russian pilots then fled like craven cowards after two of their number were shot down. “We never run! We fight like real men! We are warriors!” Sergei had spluttered with indignation, glaring furiously at the screen, all but baring his teeth.

Yurii shoved off towards his TSS in Destiny, and Sergei turned to his laptop, stuck to a tray with Velcro that was attached to a folding clamp on the rim of his kayuta’s doorway – he could push it out of the way when not needed. He opened up Outlook Express to check his e-mail. A brief note from his parents, who wrote him daily; and one from Kazakh Soyuz commander Temir, who was to fly up to the ISS on a Soyuz “taxi” mission. There also were a couple of e-mails from some Air Force buddies who kept him posted on the latest happenings and gossip. I wish I could be there, Sergei thought wistfully; he missed the camaraderie of squadron life. Maybe if things go bad here, I can go back to the Air Force … If only there was a Space Force, like in that Star Wars movie! He had marveled at the way the spacecraft could effortlessly take off from the ground and soar into space within minutes – a technological breakthrough that was a long way off in the real world, if it was ever implemented at all. Probably be the Amerikantsi who invent it, like they do everything else, he thought bitterly.

After sending off replies, Sergei spent a few minutes playing his Krasnyi Sokol fighter jet flight simulator, a game that he had installed on the laptop to keep up some semblance of flying skills. As the operating system was only Windows 98 it was fairly slow and clunky, but better than nothing. He used a plug-in joystick to maneuver his Su-27 as he shot down enemy F-15E Eagles – a small satisfaction. He could also fly an MiG-31, MiG-29 and Su-47 (the latter jet had only been built as a test model, but had attracted much interest in the aviation world with its striking forward-swept wings) to combat the F-15E, F-16, F/A-18, and F-22.

I wonder what Joe would say if he saw me doing this? Joe had flown F-15s during his time in the U.S. Air Force and, had their two countries gone to war in the 1990s, Sergei and Joe might well have flown in mortal combat.

Up here, he missed parachuting and flying like nothing else, and intended to get back into these as soon as he returned to Earth. I’ll have to wait a few weeks till I go parachuting, though, else I’ll break every bone in my body. Each month they were up here, more calcium was leeched from their bones, making them ever-more brittle – a similar process to osteoporosis in old people. Despite the trio’s diligent exercising, their monthly medical exam results demonstrated this inexorable process. The average for crews was 14 per cent over six months, though they were well below that so far.

Yawning again, Sergei glanced at his watch – it was nearly 2230, well past their 2130 bedtime. They usually used their sleep period to catch up on recreational activities as there was so little time for this otherwise. They would occasionally watch one of the mostly American DVD movies on the DVD laptop player, but were usually too tired or busy with other activities. Many of these became tedious after the first viewing, anyhow.

Sergei had bought up a few of his favorite Russian movies, like White Star of the Desert, Aleksandr Nevskii, Solaris, Aelita and The Andromeda Nebula, which he and Yurii enjoyed for nostalgic value and escapism.

He exited the game, then spent a few minutes gazing out the kayuta window to relax his eyes after staring at computer screens all day. The ISS was circling through its twelfth daily orbit of the 15.6 orbits it completed every 24 hours. The Station was passing over the southern Balkan Peninsula and Black Sea; traveling at around 7.68 kilometers per second or 460.8 km per hour, he would pass over Ukraine and southern Russia in four minutes or so. From his porthole, he was looking south, towards the Equator. He gazed wistfully at the sparkling blue ocean and heavily folded mountains as the ISS speeded over them. I miss home. When on Earth, he had longed to be in space, but when he got up here he, like the others, felt periodic homesickness – a reminder they were creatures of Earth.

He moved a lever around the rim of the window to close the diaphragm-like inner shutter.

Sergei shut down his computer, folding the articulating arm it was mounted on to move it out of the way. He glanced across at Joe, who was already snugly wedged into his sleeping bag. Sergei wriggled fully into his and pulled up the vertical zipper. Curiously, he found that he missed sleeping in his bed on Earth – the sensations of being able to snuggle under the blankets and sprawl wearily on his mattress.

He poked his right arm out one of the holes on either side of the bag so he could turn off the light, but before he did, he gazed at his photos stuck to the kayuta wall as part of his usual bedtime ritual. There was one of him from a few years ago, grinning happily in the cockpit of his Sukhoi Su-27, and another of the Russkie Vityazi aerobatic team when he flew for a season with them at Kubinka Air Force Base.

An earlier squadron photo was of him standing in front of the first jet he had been assigned to in 1993: the twin-seat MiG-31 interceptor, stationed at the chilly northern port of Arkhangel’sk. He’d had great fun harassing Norwegian F-16 pilots and other NATO aircraft patrolling the Barents Sea. (Dmitri, his nervous radar intercept operator, had been somewhat less enthusiastic.) One of his favorite stunts – inspired by a scene from a video of Top Gun – was to fly directly over the jet he was tormenting, invert his MiG-31 and look directly into the cockpit from only a couple of meters overhead, to the consternation of the foreign pilot below him. He would then take a photo of his counterpart’s stunned expression, give him “the finger,” and speed off at over Mach 2 – other jets had no hope of catching the MiG-31. There had been several complaints from NATO to the Russian Air Force about some “crazy Russian pilot” performing “dangerous and illegal maneuvers” near their aircraft.

From earlier times was a photo of Sergei as a gawky 12-year-old with his father and mother on a summer holiday beside the Black Sea; and two photos taken during a visit to the Buran shuttle before its launch in 1988. I wish I could go back there. Then, the future had seemed bright and boundless. A part of him longed for the time before the traumas of the collapse of Communism beset his country. At least we had our own space program, then … Now, we will be lucky if we make it to Mars in my lifetime.

Joe similarly had photos from his USAF days, and his few years as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base – but, pointedly, none of his ex-wife Kelly. “It was the happiest time of my life,” Joe had confided to Sergei in a rare moment of openness, “flying in the high desert with nothing but the salt lakes and blue sky around me.” He had tested the F-22 Raptor, and had later flown a NASA SR-71 Blackbird for Dryden’s high-speed research program in 1991. The legendary Mach-3 jet had been controversially retired from the USAF in 1990 then reinstated from 1995 to 1998. To the dismay of its many fans – Joe included – the “Habu” had been permanently retired in 1991 when the Dryden program came to an end, and the various aircraft were distributed to museums. There was a photo of Joe in the Habu’s cockpit, in white helmet and orange high-altitude pressure suit, and another of himself standing in front of the sinister-looking black jet.

“I wish I’d been able to fly the X-15, though,” he said, referring to the sleek black rocket plane which had streaked over the desert at nearly Mach 6 in the 1960s.

Yurii bedded down in his TSS in Destiny. It’s spooky down here, he thought disgruntledly, as always. They had viewed the four Alien movies one week and all three later had nightmares about being pursued through endless modules in the Station with the predatory creatures on their heels. Yurii quickly peeked out just to check nothing was lurking there, then pushed shut the two doors. The only aspect of the TSS he liked was that protective radiation bricks surrounded it and provided him with some shielding. Each day in orbit exposed them to as much radiation as they would receive from natural sources in one year on Earth.

The TSS was nicknamed the “Izolyator” as it was uncannily similar to a solitary confinement cell – or “padded cell”. The Zvezda module, an upgraded version of the original Mir core module, had only been intended to hold a crew of two, so there was no third kayuta there. An intercom was set up between the Russian and American segments, but only the Russian-to-U.S. path currently worked, and the noisy modules drowned out the person speaking. “We’ll just get a long piece of string and two tin cans,” Joe had suggested, in one of his occasional humorous moods.

Yurii’s reading material was mostly confined to technical and sports journals and books, and Russian space magazines such as Novosti Kosmonavti. He grabbed a favorite edition of the latter which featured an article on themselves, and read through it yet again for a few minutes, then stuffed it behind a bungee cord with an edition of the sports magazine Sovetskii Sport that contained an article on his gymnastics career. Like his crewmates, he had secured his favorite photos to the wall in front of him and he gazed at them, losing himself in old memories.

Yurii had no family portraits as he was an orphan, raised in a State children’s institution in Moscow. Not just any institution, but a highly secretive one directed at training youngsters to become future cosmonauts – the so-called “space orphans”. They had received extensive training in engineering and technologies related to space flight, as well as physical training and sports – Yurii had become a world-class gymnast and had, in fact, competed in the Olympic Games. One of his wall photos taken during those Games was of him performing a difficult maneuver on the rings called the krest, supporting himself in an upright position with his arms extended sideways. He still competed in national competitions when he could, determinedly keeping up his training and fitness.

Like Sergei, he missed his favorite physical activities while in orbit and it would take weeks or months to build up his strength again when he returned to Earth. As well as bone density they also lost muscle mass, so all three exercised fanatically to counteract this. Yurii did an extra half-hour or so of stretching and flexibility exercises each day – as, on Earth, most of these worked against gravity, he had to be creative and use bungee cords, hand and foot restraints to anchor himself up here.

Yurii did not advertise his past – it was not mentioned in his online Energiya biography – as these days it would evoke only pity or derision (though saying that he was an orphan was almost guaranteed to elicit women’s sympathy). The state institution system had broken down along with the rest of the USSR after 1991 – as far as he knew. But it was not a bad thing, Yurii thought defensively. At least I never doubted what I wanted to be.

“But don’t you miss having parents?” Sergei had asked him once.

“Nyet – I can’t miss what I never knew,” Yurii replied, somewhat irritably. Yurii had never tried to trace his parents, even if it had been possible; perhaps it was better not to know. But occasionally, he wondered.

Those at the institution in 1972 had not even known his exact birth date, so they gave him Yurii Gagarin’s birthday of 9 March – and named him after the first spaceman.

Like Sergei, he had spent several summers as a youth in Pioneerskaya Organizatsiya camps on the Black Sea – that organization had vanished after 1991. He still kept in contact with a few other orphans from his year group, now scattered throughout Russia’s space industry – he exchanged the aforementioned coded e-mails with them.

They, like him, were bitter about the betrayal of their space program by politicians such as Gorbachyov and Yeltsin – Those traitors sold us out. And, like Sergei, he had considered quitting the space program altogether – I could make a living as a computer programmer or gymnastics coach. But I will endure here a little longer …

Yurii slid into his sleeping bag, and zipped up after retrieving and tucking in Misha, a battered black-and-white toy dog that had been with him since he was young. He managed to still his frustrated thoughts and was soon sound asleep.

“Spokoynoy noch’yu, Joe,” said Sergei after switching off his fluorescent light. Joe murmured, “ ’night,” from his kayuta, and both donned their earphones – the Station was never silent as it continued on its endless glide around the Earth. Joe shut his kayuta door, as did Sergei – the closed doors helped muffle some of the ever-present module noise. Sergei daydreamed for a few minutes before sleep carried him away …

Appendix

NASA (and other) glossary

DVD

Digital Video Disk

ISS

International Space Station

JSC

Johnson Space Center

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

TSS

Temporary Sleep Station

USAF

United States Air Force

Russian glossary

Amerikantsy

Американцы

Americans

Andromeda

«Андромеда»

Izolyator

Изолятор

Isolation/punishment cell; solitary confinement cell

Kayuta

Каюта

Cabin

Krasnyi Sokol

«Красный Сокол»

Red Falcon

Krest

Крест

Cross

Kto?

Кто?

Who?

Moskva

Москва

Moscow

Novosti Kosmonavtiki

«Новости Космонавтики»

Cosmonautics News (magazine)

Nyet

Нет

No

Pioneerskaya Organizatsiya

Пионерская Организация

Pioneer Organization

Russkie Vityazi

«Русские Витязи»

Russian Knights

Sovetskii Sport

«Советский Спорт»

Spokoynoy noch’yu

Спокойной ночью!

Good night

Strizhi

Стрижи

Swifts

Zvyozdyi Gorodok

Звёздый Городок

Star City

© Suzanne B. McHale, 2002-August 2003; revised June 2007