When he’d finished, Stone drifted back down to the wardroom. His next job was to run a visual sextant check of the Soviets’ position.

As he made his observations, Soyuz maneuvered away from the backdrop of the Moon and floated against the stars.

“Moonlab, this is Komarov. Moonlab—”

Muldoon replied for Moonlab. “We hear you, Komarov. The VHF link is working fine.” Viktorenko, on Soyuz, had used English; Muldoon replied in halting Russian.

Muldoon went through a four-way conversation between Moonlab, Soyuz, and the two ground control stations at Houston and Kaliningrad, testing out links and confirming system status.

Soyuz wheeled around so that it faced Moonlab. “Moonlab, Komarov. We are ready for the final docking maneuver. I will turn on my beacon.”

A light began to flash on the spine of Soyuz, easily visible through the picture window.

“I see you, Komarov.”

“And I you, Joe. Your elegant Moonlab is difficult to miss. We have our space suits on, all ready for docking. And our bow ties on top, for we are ready for a fine dinner with you.”

Houston and Kaliningrad both called up “go” for the docking. Soyuz spun slowly on its long axis, rolling through sixty degrees to align correctly with the docking module. The solar arrays made Soyuz look almost birdlike, swooping around the Moon like some unlikely metal swallow.

Soyuz came in slowly and hesitantly, with many small attitude and angle corrections. At one point the ship even backed off from Moonlab. The Moonlab crew and Houston kept quiet; Stone listened to the soft, tense, dialogue in Russian between Komarov and Kaliningrad.

Komarov was evidently a pig to fly. Soyuz was a flexible ferry craft, but it was essentially a contemporary of the American Gemini, lacking much of the sophistication and power of Apollo. There was a real lack of precise attitude control and translation instruments, with most of the operations conducted by preprogrammed mission event sequencers.

In fact, the poor maneuverability of Soyuz had caused some friction during the planning stages of this joint flight. Some on the U.S. side had suggested, half-seriously, that Soyuz should be the “passive” partner — that Apollo should haul the bulk of Moonlab into the docking with the tiny Soyuz…

Anyhow it looked as if Soyuz was coming in on its final approach. As it neared, bristling with detail, Komarov arced up and out of Stone’s view, and he heard Muldoon calling out in Russian.

“Five yards… three yards… one…”

There was a soft clang, a rattle of docking latches.

“Well-done, Vlad,” Muldoon called. “Good show, tovarich. You came in at just a foot per second.”

“Indeed. Now Apollo and Soyuz are shaking hands, here in the shadow of the Moon. Yes?”

The cosmonauts moved into the small docking module and sealed it up. They had to sit out there three hours as the pressure was reduced to match Moonlab’s.