It was all kind of cute and rural, but desperately primitive. Wooden houses and hand pumps, next door to a cosmonaut training center.

The convoy turned right on an unmarked road, into a pine forest. Just around the bend there was a guard post. After a couple of minutes’ checking with the drivers, the convoy went on into a large clearing in the forest. There were several tall apartment buildings there, a few low office buildings, some stores. At one end of the clearing there were small lakes, at the other a dozen large, blocky structures.

Shawled babushkas pushed baby carriages along the sidewalks, while the noise of jet aircraft ripped down constantly from the air.

This was Starry Town, purpose-built to house and train the cosmonaut corps. It struck Muldoon as a cross between a university campus and a military training camp.

The driver pointed out the hydro pool, a neutral buoyancy trainer, the Cosmonaut Museum. At the center of the clearing, facing the convoy, was a statue of Gagarin: larger than life, heroic, inspirational.

Muldoon grimaced. There were no statues to him, anywhere, even though he’d gone so much farther than Gagarin. But then, he wasn’t safely dead.

His apartment was huge. More like a suite. He wandered through the rooms. The place was crammed with furniture, all of it heavy and old-fashioned: sofas, overstuffed chairs, heavy tables. There was a thick shag pile on the floor, and flocked paper on every inch of wall. He found the bathroom, and there he had to laugh. There was no soap, and there were no plugs for the bath or sink, and only one towel.

And probably a bug in every damn light fixture.

He glanced out of the window. He saw white pines, barbed wire. A black limousine cruised along one of the central access roads: probably KGB, Muldoon thought. Home away from home. Like a fucking prison camp.

He jammed a washcloth in the plug hole and ran a bath.

He dressed in his dinner suit and went down to the bar.

It wasn’t much like the Intourist place in Moscow. But there was a barman, polishing glasses; he had a thin, Asiatic face. Muldoon asked for a beer. It proved to be cold; it was a Czech brand, and it tasted good. There was nobody else there. Some kind of god-awful piano music tinkled over a PA.

There was going to be a reception tonight, before a dinner in the place’s dining room, all to celebrate the progress of Moonlab-Soyuz. Fred Michaels himself was supposed to attend, and God alone knew how many Soviet big fish. You’ll have to take it easy, Muldoon Watch what you say. No more hostages to fortune. He knew what to expect at the dinner, though: meat, lots of it, with piles of cream and butter. Deliciously bad for him.

He was clapped on the back. “My friend Joe. I thought I might find you the first here. Welcome back to Zvezdnoy Gorodok, to Starry Town. You are still drinking that warmed-over piss you prefer, I see. Barman!” Vladimir Viktorenko snapped his fingers.

The barman delivered a bottle of vodka, two glasses, and a small bowl of salt. “Here. Drink. Mother’s milk,” Viktorenko ordered. He poured out a glass for Muldoon.

Muldoon took a lick of salt, then threw back the liquid; it was tasteless, harsh, clawing at his throat. “Thank you, my friend,” he said in his hesitant Russian. “Immediately you appear a much more handsome fellow.” The idea was that in lunar orbit, the Americans would speak Russian and the Soviets English. Muldoon was finding the language training the hardest part of the whole damn program.

Viktorenko bellowed out a laugh. He took a drink himself. “Tonight, all five of us will drink from this bottle, and we will sign the label. When we have returned from the Moon we will meet again, and toast our success from the very same bottle.” He poured Muldoon another glass.

“To the mission,” Muldoon said.

“Oh, no.” Viktorenko threw up his hands in mock horror. “One must not say such things. In Russia, this is bad luck. Seven hundred hours of Russian lessons, and they did not teach you this? Tsk. We should toast our preparations. That is enough.”

“Our preparations, then.” Muldoon drank again.

Vladimir Pavlovich Viktorenko was something of a legend among the cosmonauts — among the astronauts, too, come to that. He was stocky, jovial, full of energy; his broad head with its graying crew cut, looked as if it had been bolted to his shoulders, and his ruddy cheeks were puffed up. All that borscht and potatoes. He was of the same vintage as Muldoon, roughly: he had applied to join the cosmonaut program in its first recruitment sweep, in 1960. He had copiloted the Voskhod 3 mission in 1966, a flight in which an adapted one-man Vostok capsule had taken two men, precariously, into orbit, and Viktorenko had watched as his copilot had taken a space walk out of a flimsy blow-up airlock.

There had been a rumor that Viktorenko had been the Soviets’ prime candidate for their abandoned lunar landing program. Muldoon had tried probing about that, but Viktorenko wouldn’t open up.

And here was Viktorenko as Muldoon’s counterpart, the commander of the Soviet crew for Moonlab-Soyuz.

Viktorenko asked after Jill, Muldoon’s wife, whom he’d met, and charmed the pants off, in Houston.

Muldoon just shrugged.

Jill hadn’t been too ecstatic about his being back on the active roster and returning to the Moon, for God’s sake. And, truth to tell, he wasn’t sure if she’d even be there for him when he got back from this jaunt.

There wasn’t anything he could do about it. He had to fly; for him that was a parameter, a fact he had to live with. Even to the exclusion of Jill. He didn’t express any of this, but he sensed Viktorenko understood, and the cosmonaut didn’t press him.

Muldoon felt himself mellowing as the vodka went to work; he washed it down with a little Czech beer.

The bar was beginning to fill up, mostly with NASA engineering staff, and a few Soviets. Adam Bleeker walked in, nodded to Muldoon, and made for the bar.

It was encouraging to see the American and Soviet teams working together properly, Muldoon thought. It had taken a long time. The idea of joint flights had been opposed by the Soviets because of a distrust of Americans — and from within the U.S., for suspicion that the Soviets’ true motives for cooperating were all about getting their hands on American technology.

But that was a lot of crap, Muldoon thought. After all both Soyuz and Moonlab/Apollo technologies were ten years old; what the hell was there to steal? Besides, Carter and Ted Kennedy were putting a lot of muscle behind this trip; for Carter, the Moonlab stunt — originally a scheme of Nixon’s — had become a way of symbolizing his achievement in getting the Soviets to sign up for the SALT II treaty.

Sometimes, Muldoon felt bewildered by the pace of change; it seemed to accelerate as he got older.

“You know, Vladimir, we’ve been working on this program for a couple of years now, but it still seems odd to me sometimes that here we are, you and I, drinking vodka together in a Moscow bar. Even one run by the KGB.”

“How so?”

“If things had turned out differently, I might have found myself flying solo into Moscow with two nukes strapped under my wings, instead of my pajamas and toothbrush.”

“Nukes,” Viktorenko said. “Indeed. And now we are comrades again. But that is what makes us unique, men like you and I, Joe. We are aviators. We rise to our mission, whatever it may be. To the edge of the envelope, and beyond. Once our mission was to ferry nukes. And now our mission is to shake hands in space. And that we will do, as well as we can. These others — the paper-pushers, even the engineers: these others can never understand such things. It has always been so.

“Why, I remember my induction into the Vostok program,” he said. “I was put into an isolation chamber. A box. For several weeks. And then a thermal chamber, and then a decompression chamber. And then, straightaway, I was taken to the airport, put on a plane, and ordered to parachute back to Earth. The doctors, the quacks, justified such treatment by saying they needed to know how I would react on the abrupt change from an enclosed cabin to the boundlessness of infinite space. Ha.”