Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [65]
"And that's their best pilot," Baker muttered.
"I didn't look too good myself—"
"Bullshit. You had a tumbling target. We're as stable as a streetcar." Baker watched a few moments more and shook his head. "Not their fault, of course. Control systems. We've got the onboard computers. They don't. But it's a bloody damned shame."
Rick Delanty's mahogany face wrinkled. "Don't know I can take much more of this, Johnny."
It was excruciating for both of them. It made the fingers flex, itching to take over. Back-seat drivers are formed by such tensions.
"And he's got the lunch," Baker said. "When's he going to give up?"
They entered darkness. Communications with Soyuz were limited to official messages. When they came into the light again, the Soviet craft approached once more.
"It's going to get hungry up here," Delanty said.
"Shut up."
"Yes, sir."
"Fuck you."
"Not possible in a full pressure suit."
They watched again. Eventually Jakov called: "We are wasting needed fuel. Request Plan B."
"Soyuz, roger, stand by to implement Plan B," Baker said with visible relief. He winked at Delanty. "Now show the commies what a real American can do."
Plan B was officially an emergency measure, but all the American mission planners had predicted privately that it would be needed. In the U.S. they'd trained as if Plan B would be the normal mode of operation. Across the Atlantic it was hoped it wouldn't be needed—but they'd planned on it too. Plan B was simple: The Soyuz stabilized itself, and the Apollo-Hammerlab monstrosity maneuvered to it.
Delanty was flying a spacecraft and a big, clumsy, massive tin can. (Now picture an aircraft carrier trying to maneuver under a descending airplane.) But he also had the world's most sophisticated computer system, attitude controls painstakingly turned out by master machinists with thousands of hours' experience, instruments developed in a dozen laboratories accustomed to making precision instruments.
"Houston, Houston, Plan B under way," Baker reported.
And now the whole damned world's watching me. Or listening, Rick Delanty thought. And if I blow it …
That was unthinkable.
"Relax," Baker said.
He didn't offer to do it himself, Delanty thought. Well. Here goes. Just like on the simulator.
It was. One straight thrust; check just before contact, and a tiny pulse of the jets to move the two crafts together. Again the mechanical feel of contact, and simultaneously the flare of green lights on the board.
"Latch it," Rick said.
"Soyuz, we are docked, latch the docking probe," Baker called.
"Apollo, affirmative. We are locked on."
"Last one inside's a rotten egg," Baker said.
They shook hands, formally, all around, as they floated inside the big tin can. A historic occasion, the commentators were saying below; but Baker couldn't think of any historic words to say.
There was just too damned much to do. This wasn't a spectacular, a handshake in space like Apollo-Soyuz. This was a working mission, with a hairy schedule that they probably couldn't keep up with, even with luck.
And yet … Baker had the urge to laugh. He might have if it wouldn't have needed so many explanations. He would have laughed at how good they all looked.
God bless us, there's none like us. Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik was darkly beautiful. With her imperious self-confidence she could have played a czarina, but her smooth, hard muscles would better have fitted her for the prima ballerina's role. A cold and lovely woman.
Heartbreaker, Johnny Baker thought. But secretly vulnerable, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes. I wonder if she's as coldly polite with everyone as she is with Brigadier Jakov?
Brigadier Pieter Ivanovitch Jakov, Hero of the People (which class? Baker wondered), the perfect man to illustrate an enlistment poster. Handsome, well muscled, cold eyes: He looked a lot like Johnny Baker himself, and this wasn't really more surprising than Rick Delanty's superficial resemblance to Muhammad Ali.
Four of us, fully mature specimens in