Skyfall

“There is no trouble,” Glushko said, his eyes murderous and cold as he avoided looking at his opposite number. “It is the Americans who have stopped the work. We're ready to proceed at once.”

“All right, I'll come, for the sake of unity, peace, mir. Remember this is a joint project so I'd appreciate it if you would both at least act as though you wished to act jointly.” He repeated this in Russian as he lumbered out of the door and into the full heat of the day, the beads of sweat turning to rivulets as the sun smote him. Vandelft was at the tiller of one of the golf carts the NASA personnel used for getting about the sprawling base, and Flax squeezed in beside him. The Soviets scorned this effete form of transportation and Glushko was already on his bicycle leading the way.

You just never get used to the size, Flax thought. And in a couple of days I'm going to be sitting in Mission Control and coaxing this bird into orbit. It's a long way from Pszczyna.

Flax rarely thought of his native town, for America had been his home since he had been eleven. But Poland was the land of his birth, German Poland really and his family had still been considered Germans though they had lived there for generations. His father was headmaster of the local school, an educated man by any standards, and had raised his son the same way. German was spoken at home and Russian and Polish in the streets and in school, so young Flax was native in all three languages, an ability his father had not permitted him to lose when they had emigrated to the United States when threats of war were in the air. Bookish and always overweight, he had few friends, and no girl friends. The refusal of the Army to draft him because he was so fat only added to his humiliation and drove him further into his studies. He was studying engineering at Columbia University then and he smelled opportunity when the first course in electronics was offered a field so new that they didn't even have a textbook and had to work from mimeographed notes done the same day of each class. He had gone into radar research, then, when working for the same army that had refused him entry a few years earlier, he felt that justice was coming his way at last. When NASA was organized he was there at the inception, his technical knowledge and linguistic ability keeping him on top when the German rocket scientists were whisked away ahead of the advancing Russians. After this he had never looked back; some people thought that Flax was Mission Control and he never told them differently. Now with the joint Soviet-American project he was at the peak of his career. But it did get tiring.

The fast elevator shot up inside the servicing tower and they emerged into the air-conditioned comfort of the Prometheus

Assembly Building. PAB was a building without a base, a five-storey structure perched high in the air on top of the servicing tower that enclosed the entire upper structure of the spacecraft. Not only were the immense boosters and core body too big to be put together in a normal Vehicle Assembly Building, but they would have been too massive to move once joined. Therefore they had been assembled and joined in the open with temporary shelters covering the sensitive stages. They had been designed with this in mind and would not suffer from exposure.

But Prometheus itself could not be treated in this cavalier manner. It had been built at the Kennedy Space Flight Center under the usual sterile and controlled conditions, air conditioned at all times to protect the circuitry from corrosion and the computer from temperature failure. After disassembly the various parts had been flown to the Soviet Union by a specially modified fleet of C5-As. Therefore the need for PAB, perched above the rockets, a building with the correct environment where the components could be reassembled.

Technicians moved aside when the three men crossed the floor to the entry hatch. Flax led the way, puffing as he pulled himself through the opening, and looked round the now familiar Flight Cabin.

As in any other Flight Cabin the controls and instruments dominated everything. Yuri Gagarin went into space as a passenger facing a panel with twelve different instruments. Things had changed a bit since his time. Systems of all kinds proliferated and with each new system came controls, with the controls meters and readouts, until every available inch of space on all sides of the two pilots' couches was thick with them. Just learning the position and function of the instrumentation required thousands of hours of study, then hundreds of hours in the Flight Cabin Simulator putting this knowledge into practice.

“Just look at that,” Vandelft said, angrily. “Look how the Russkies have fucked everything up!”

“Fook up!” Glushko shouted. In his months working with the Americans he had at least picked up that much English.