Viktorenko reached over Gershon and pushed closed the inner hatch, a fat plug of metal. Immediately the wind noise, the chattering of the technicians, was cut off, and York felt sealed in. Entombed.

She heard the techs slam shut the outer hatch.

The noise of the chopper increased to a muffled drone. She felt her heart pump harder. There was a pounding on the hull, and then a soft, slithering scraping, as, York guessed, cables slid over the surface of the craft.

Ralph Gershon picked his gum out of his mouth and stuck it under his seat, seemingly unconcerned.

The chopper’s engine roared. There was a brief strobing of the light at her window — helicopter blades, passing over the Command Module — and then a yank upward, as if the Soyuz had turned into a high-speed elevator.

York felt the air rush out of her lungs, and the pressure points of her couch dug into her back and hips.

Beyond her window the receding steppe rocked back and forth like a plaster-of-paris model in a sim. She saw a little circle of engineers, waving their caps, their faces turned up like dusty flowers.

Grit fled in concentric circles across the steppe, away from the capsule, and the technicians staggered back, shielding their eyes.

Then she could no longer see the ground: her window was a disk of clouded sky.

York’s pressure suit was getting hot. She could feel perspiration pooling under her, in a little slick that gathered in the small of her back. But at the same time, thanks to some quirk of the Soviet suit’s cooling system, her feet were cold. She tried to curl up her toes inside the layers which constrained them.

Gershon, lying beside her, was all elbows.

There was a TV camera — a crude-looking thing, like something out of the 1950s — fixed to the cabin wall, just above Gershon’s head. York didn’t know if it was live or not. A small metal toy, a spaceman, dangled in front of the lens on a metal chain; as the cabin swung about under the chopper, the little toy rocked back and forth.

Viktorenko caught her eyeing the model. “You are admiring my friend Boris.” He pronounced it Bah-reess “Boris has a major role to play, in the correct functioning of the Soyuz.” He pointed. “You see the TV camera. That is trained on Boris at all times. By watching his antics, the ground can determine the exact moment at which we become weightless. Ingenious, no?…”

Then the capsule lurched to the right. York felt the weight of the two men compressing her against the wall.