“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.