Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [210]
They were all soaked in sweat. It had been a hot ride. "Everybody okay?" Johnny asked.
"Rojj."
"Yes, thank you."
"Let's get the hell out," Rick said.
Johnny didn't see the hurry; but Rick and Pieter must be hellishly cramped back there. Rick had suggested the arrangement himself, but that wouldn't make it more comfortable. Johnny fumbled with the unfamiliar locks. They wouldn't work until he cursed them; then the latch popped open.
"Oops."
"What is it?" Rick asked. Leonilla craned to look past him.
"Curtain time," said Johnny. He stood in the hatch and smiled brilliantly into a crowd that bristled with shotguns and rifles. More than a dozen men faced him, and no women. He wasn't counting, but he saw half a dozen shotguns and a lot of rifles and revolvers, and Jesus!—two Army submachine guns.
He raised his hands. It wasn't easy to keep them high and still scramble out of the capsule. What were they all so damned nervous about? He moved, rotated, so they could see the U.S. flag on his shoulder. "Don't shoot, I'm a hero."
They were not a prepossessing lot. They were half-drowned rats in farm clothes much the worse for total disaster, and their faces were as grim as their guns. There were a couple of bloody bandages in evidence, too. Johnny had a sudden wild impulse to speak in pidgin talk: Me-fella big astronaut, come from same country belong you-fella. He controlled it.
One spoke from the semicircle. He was white-haired and stout—though not as stout as his coveralls; they had all shrunk within their clothes. But his arms were as thick as a wrestler's. The lightweight machine gun looked fragile in his big hands. "Tell us, Hero, how you come to be in a commie airplane."
"Spaceship. We're from Hammerlab. You know about Hammerlab?" (Head belong you-fella him savvy big rocket go up up up in sky long-time not come down?) "Hammerlab was the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission in space. We went up to study the comet."
"We know."
"Okay, the Apollo got a hole poked through it. We think it got hit by a snowflake moving at God's own speed. We had to beg a ride home with the Soviets. In their spaceship. I'm—"
"Johnny Baker! I know him, that's Johnny Baker." The voice belonged to a man: thin, limp black hair, slender fingers wrapped around an enormous shotgun. "Hey!"
"Pleased to meet you," said Johnny, and he was. "Would it hurt if I put my hands down?"
"Go ahead," said the white-haired spokesman. He was obviously the man in charge, partly by tradition, partly because of bull strength. The submachine gun didn't hurt his leadership credentials. It hadn't moved, aimed not quite at Johnny. "Who else is in there?"
"The other astronauts. Two Soviets and another American. It's crowded in there. They'd like to come out, if … well, if you people can stay calm about it."
"Nobody excited here," the spokesman said. "Bring out your friends. I got some questions for them. Like why did the commies come down here?"
"Where could we go? Only one spaceship for the four of us. Leonilla?"
She stepped out, smiling, her hands slightly raised. Johnny announced, "Leonilla Malik. The first woman in space." It wasn't strictly true, but it sounded good.
The hard stares softened. The white-haired man lowered his weapon. "I'm Deke Wilson," he said. "Come on out, miss. Or is it comrade?"
"Whatever you choose," she said. She scrambled down from the open hatchway and stood blinking at the reflected light off the sheet of water two hundred yards to the west. "My first visit to America. Or outside the Soviet Union. They wouldn't let me out before."
"Others coming," Johnny said. "Pieter … "
Brigadier General Jakov was not smiling. His hands were high and his back was straight, the hammer-and-sickle and CCCP prominent on his shoulder. The farmers were looking wary again. "General Pieter Jakov," Johnny announced, making the pronunciation very Russian in the hope that nobody would get smart-mouthed about the name.