"Dimitri," he said to his aide, who was sitting across the desk holding a glass of champagne in his hand, "that was Moscow. We must prepare for three manned launches imme- diately."
Dimitri dropped his champagne glass onto the thick Oriental carpet.
"Intelligence claims that the Americans are on their way to recapturing their space stations," the General explained. "If we don't take our own back from the counterrevolutionar- ies the Americans will get them. In a matter of hours!"
"But three manned launches? Now?" 552
General Maksutov nodded bitterly. "Rouse the men —full crews and full backups. I'll call Andrei and give him the joyful news. The ground crews must be alerted. See to it."
The aide nodded dumbly and pushed himself up from his chair. Absently, he noticed that the glass had not broken. He picked it up and placed it on the desk with a slightly shaking hand.
"Get the infirmary to issue wake-up pills. You'd better take some yourself."
"Yessir."
"Happy New Year, comrade," the General said bitterly. "And happy new millennium."
Dimitri shook his head. "This is too much like the old millennium."
"Yes, isn't it? Except that back in the twentieth century we didn't have the duty of killing our own countrymen, you and I."
The launch was shown on the mammoth TV screens set up in Times Square and other places where the crowds had gathered. The people watched, a sea of murmuring humanity, as the final few seconds of countdown licked off and the shuttle sat bathed in the spotlights against the balmy Florida night, waiting, waiting . . .
"Three . . . two . . . one . . . Ignition!"
For an instant, nothing happened. Then the shuttle started to roll down the runway, a thundering roar propelling it faster and faster as it swept past the camera and hurtled into the dark sky, furnace-hot blossoms of orange glowing from the engine nozzles at its tail.
The crowds ooohed.
The shuttle climbed steeply and banked gracefully left- ward, the glow of its engines reflecting off the low-lying mists from the nearby sea. The camera followed it until it became a distant speck indistinguishable from the stars scattered across the night sky.
And the TV announcer never missed a beat. "The liftoff is fine, fine . . . she's climbing precisely on course now, carrying the first load of interplanetary immigrants in the history of the human race ..."
Dinner had been quiet, tense. Kinsman and the three other men had eaten quickly, sitting around the portable 553 dining table without much conversation, watching the TV screen. It alternated between shots of the shuttle countdown and launch, views of the New Year's Eve crowds in Manhat- tan, and long dreary segments of "entertainment."
"Well, Frank," Kinsman said as the big wall screen showed a telescopic view of the shuttle in flight, "you can relax now. They got the bird off without you."
"Yeah," said Colt.
