The sky was empty, a harsh blue. Beyond the launch facilities, the wind whipped sand across the nude, flat steppe. Bert Seger was glad he was safely tucked away behind the glass of that observation room, three miles from the pad.

Behind him there was a murmur of conversation from the other guests — program managers, minor politicians, academicians, celebrities — who seemed more intent on the food and drink, which was lavish enough, and on pursuing whatever low-level political and diplomatic gains were still to be wrung out of this joint mission.

Seger had binoculars around his neck; he raised them and fixed them on the launch complex itself.

The N-1 booster stood tall on its pad. N for Nosityel — the Carrier. It sat on a porchlike structure at the lip of a flame pit. The mobile service structure had already been lowered; at three-quarters of an hour before liftoff the towers had been swung down through ninety degrees to the ground, leaving the booster exposed. The booster was a vertical line, out of place in the huge, horizontal landscape.

Seger saw propellants vent from the N-1’s multiple stages, and flags of vapor smeared across the still, layered air. The lower three stages made up a slim, truncated cone, flaring at the base, and the upper stages and the spacecraft itself were an upright cylinder stacked on top of that. The upper stages alone were about the size and shape of a Saturn IB. And somewhere inside that complex, Seger knew, the Soyuz T-3 spacecraft was buried; and somewhere within that were two cosmonauts, sitting out the final minutes of their countdown.

The whole thing looked like a piece of the Kremlin. Nobody could mistake an N-1 for an American design. But the N-1 was nevertheless the stepbrother of the Saturn, fathered by a group of postwar German exiles who’d built on the same Nazi technology taken to White Sands by von Braun and his people. Another child of the V-2.

“Here.” Fred Michaels stood at his elbow; he held out a glass of vodka. “You look like you could use this.”

Seger eyed the drink doubtfully. “Thanks, but I don’t encourage drinking on launch days, Fred.”

“Drink. That’s an order. Bert, it’s their launch, not ours.”

Seger forced himself to laugh and took the drink. “You’re right. I suppose I’m a control nut.”

“I know the feeling. But you have to learn to relax, when there really isn’t a damn thing you can do to change the course of events.”

Michaels was right, of course. The Soviets and Americans had exchanged mission control staff for this flight, with some American controllers being stationed at Kaliningrad. And there at Tyuratam the Americans had been let into the cosmodrome as far as this observation bunker. But that was the extent of it. There was no way Seger, or any of the American staff, could exert any influence over the way this launch developed.

“I’m just glad they aren’t two of our boys up there,” he said. “I wouldn’t let this damn thing fly. Fred, we wouldn’t even man-rate the N-1.”

Michaels, sleek, in control, dug his antique watch out of his vest pocket and checked the time. “So the Soviet space program is all hat and no horse, eh, Bert?”

Seger sipped his drink. It was sour vodka, but the alcohol seemed to have no effect on him. “It’s not so funny when you know as much as we do, now, about the Soviets’ preparations for launch. They do a lot of checkout in their assembly building. But then there’s very little checkout once the thing gets to the pad. Hell, there’s hardly even any electronic monitoring gear there, and only a limited computer interface. It lets them get to a launch point faster, but at the cost of a hell of a lot of reliability. No wonder they suffered so many failures with this booster.

“And did you know they’ve got a roll axis with pitch and yaw control only? That damn thing can’t control its own flight azimuth, and they have to swivel the whole support structure to align—”

“Give me that in English, Bert.”

“The Saturn V can steer itself into orbit, with its onboard computer. The N-1 can’t. Depending on where they want to head, they have to point the thing…”

This was the Soviets’ main cosmodrome, their nearest equivalent to Kennedy. It was lost in Soviet central Asia, a couple of hundred miles east of the Aral Sea;, where the Americans used the Atlantic as their firing range, the Soviets used the huge, empty heart of their country. The nearest town was Tyuratam, a small railway junction fifteen miles away, which had remained poor, shabby, and backward, despite the spectacular cosmonaut hotel planted in the middle of it.

The launch facility in use today was isolated even from the rest of the cosmodrome, situated maybe twenty miles farther to the east. They’re taking no chances. And I don’t blame them.

Seger felt cut off there, isolated, impotent. I’m nearer to the Chinese border than I am to Moscow, even.

Well, he’d done what he could to make the joint mission work. He’d pushed through a lot of steps to try to make sure his American charges and their Soviet counterparts could work together effectively, and safely. For instance he’d soon realized that the language barrier went far beyond just the Russian-English gap, and he’d assigned “Russian Interface Officers,” to translate NASA jargon into plain English, which could then be translated by the Russian interpreters. And then there was the daily schedule. His mission-planning guy had come along to Russia last year loaded down with documents. His Soviet counterpart had shown up with a pencil. There just wasn’t any paper in these offices, for instance, there was only one copy of the Soyuz mission plan for the joint project, handwritten on long rolls of paper and taped up on the walls of the Soviet Mission Control in Kaliningrad. Seger couldn’t figure if it was some sinister Soviet thing about controlling information, or just a dearth of photocopiers.

Now, showing on a TV monitor, there was a film of the two cosmonauts — Vladimir Viktorenko and Aleksandr Solovyov — taken earlier in the day. In their pressure suits, they were leaving their quarters and climbing aboard a bus. The bus looked like a tourist coach.

Seger felt a pull inside him, a protective urge. He offered up a brief prayer for the safety of the cosmonauts, and he touched his crucifix lapel pin.

Michaels observed that and raised an eyebrow.

“You do need to take it easy, Bert. I figure you’re just going through — what do they call it? — culture shock. Hell, Bert, these aren’t our boys. We’re just going to have to accept the Soviets know what they’re doing, in their own sweet way. After all the N-1 seems to be getting there as a launch system. They’ve fired off two unmanned circumlunar Soyuz shots and brought them back to Earth. And we’ve got Muldoon, Bleeker, and Stone up there in lunar orbit waiting for their bird; the Soviets really, really don’t want to screw up with this shot.”

“Maybe. I just wish they’d let some of our guys redesign their launch facilities a little bit.”

Michaels guffawed. “That would have gone down very well. Anyway, we need some success, too, Bert. As you know well enough.”

That was true, Seger realized.

The TV played a snatch of music; it was bland, slow stuff, and a PR announcer said in clipped English that this was being played simultaneously to the Soyuz, as a relaxant for the cosmonauts. Good grief, Seger thought. It would be like being stuck in an elevator.

And then, Seger saw from the timers, there was just a minute to go. He raised his binoculars.

The electrical and propellant umbilicals fell away from the walls of the ship, and the N-1 stood alone: huge, clumsy, fragile. My God. It looks like boilerplate.

Ignition came at four seconds.