by Zach Powers
“I think that our engineers and cosmonauts will undertake the next mission when it is necessary.”
“Were you lonely?” The question was asked in Russian, but Leonid recognized the accent: Ukrainian. “In orbit, did you feel alone?”
Leonid did not have a rote answer for the question. It had not come up in practice with Ignatius. He did not want to look at her, but he could sense her gaze on him.
“It’s unbearably lonely,” he said, “but one must remember that while Vostok is small, the whole of the Soviet people travels with you.”
Ignatius practically leapt up from her seat and clapped her hands once.
“Thank you all for your time,” she said, leaning into the microphones. “We must transport our cosmonaut to his next appointment.”
The cameras flashed again. Ignatius nudged Leonid out a door on the opposite side of the room from where they had entered. It led to a narrow hall lined with stacks of dusty chairs, the same child-sized chairs used by the reporters. Lightbulbs caged by metal grates protruded from the ceiling, but only every third or fourth shone. The dim illumination textured every surface as if in gray felt.
Ignatius slapped Leonid on the back. “Brilliant, comrade! You’re a born star. And that last answer couldn’t have been more perfect even if I’d scripted it myself.”
“Your lessons haven’t gone unlearned,” said Leonid.
Nadya entered the hallway and sat on one of the small chairs. She swayed in the seat. She did that sometimes. Leonid had asked her about it. Imagining weightlessness, she had explained. The motion made her seem like a child. She faintly hummed a simple melody.
The man who had introduced Leonid came into the hallway next. Ignatius offered a familiar but not overly friendly greeting. They talked just above a whisper, too soft to hear from even a meter away.
“Do you think,” Nadya asked Leonid, “that the Soviet people are still with him, now that the Soviet people think he is you?”
Ignatius glanced back and then pulled the door to the press room completely closed.
“Nadya,” said Leonid, “I don’t think they were with him even before. Never.”
Though he did not know where it led, he followed the hall toward the doorway at its distant end. Nadya rose, hurried to his side, and went with him. Faint sunlight framed the doors through the cracks and a bright gash split them down the middle.
Star City, Russia—1964
The radio room was located behind a steel door twenty centimeters thick. To open the door, Mars twisted the dial, larger than his hand, through the sixteen digits of the combination. He stopped on the final 27, and then cranked the wheel, a device that looked as if it had been borrowed from the bridge of a galleon. The lock thunked and unlatched. Despite its mass, the door glided open as if weightless. Mars pushed it closed behind him with only the tips of his fingers. A final thread of light shot through the gap and then all was dark.
Mars fumbled along the wall to the light switch, placed at more than an inconvenient distance from the door. The padded walls sucked up all sound, so this period between closing the door and lighting the room felt purgatorial, a kind of nonexistence. How the twins in space described their experiences.
Orange-white light flickered from the overhead lamps, revealing the radio console, more than three meters long, but the only thing on it was a keypad, a single red button, a small round speaker, and a microphone on a metal gooseneck, all situated just left of center. Mars keyed in the code to activate the system. The speaker crackled, fizzed with static, whined like a sick dog, and then settled into mostly silence, broken only by the occasional pop of interference.
As Mars’s ears adjusted to the faint sounds, he picked out something like humming amid the ambient hiss.
He pressed the red button and spoke into the microphone, “Leonid, is it you?”
“I never learned music.”
“I can tell.”
Leonid hummed again, an atonal tune, if it could even be called a tune, a sound somewhere between singing and mumbling.
“What do you call it?” asked Mars.
“Shit,” said Leonid.
Mars laughed. He pressed the red button and laughed again so Leonid could hear it.
“You made a joke,” said Mars. “Did you ever joke before?”
“I’ve been practicing. I’m not sure whether it’s to amuse myself or to try to elicit a laugh from the empty space all around me.”
“Any luck so far?”
“I feel dull and space remains silent. You know, none of the training prepared me for the silence outside Vostok. The capsule itself will make noise, the flow of air, creaks, several thuds that I was sure were the sound of the thing coming apart. But from outside, absolutely no noise. It’s like the anechoic chamber, but a thousand times more quiet. I guess it was just as quiet in the chamber, but there was still something outside. Could it be psychological? Did I know, even in the silence, that the microphone in the chamber connected me by wire to a room just a few meters away? What connects me now? Some incorporeal wave of cosmic energy, beamed from you to me and back again. Even if I were small enough to worm my way through a wire, I couldn’t ride the infinitesimal crests of the waves that connect me to the planet.”
“We’re with you, comrade.”
“I know, I know. I simply regret that I’m not also with you.”
* * *
• • •
WITH TRAFFIC, the trip from Moscow to Star City had taken the Chief Designer almost two hours. The sun glared in the side window the whole time, and he had sweated through his shirt. His driver apologized over and over about how long it was taking, as if the man were actually an automaton programmed to speak just that one thing. As if the driver controlled the route of every car on the road. While the Chief Designer had spent much of his life casually shuttling to and fro in aircraft, a simple car ride left him exhausted. At least in a plane he could get up and move about. The plasticky scent of the car’s interior coated him like a slick.
Star City’s campus had grown from a small huddle of low buildings to a sprawling complex complete with several towers. The dormitories came into view first, thirteen stories high, bare bricks of concrete and glass, the concrete already turning a shade of dirty brown. These three towers seemed to sprout from the middle of the forest. As the car got closer, the whole campus came into view, lower buildings arranged according to no plan that the Chief Designer could decipher, laboratories, offices, training facilities, and a few structures he had never entered and had no idea what they might contain. He would have to ask Mishin and Bushuyev, but if the Chief Designer was honest, he did not much care. He tried to ignore what he did not absolutely need to know. It was easier that way.
The whole complex grew lush with trees, left unfelled at the Chief Designer’s insistence, the only clearing a long quadrangle on the other side of the dormitories from the main training facility. The original plans had called for clear-cutting the whole area. The Chief Designer, though, had spent too many years in the treeless tundra. He argued that technology was not meant as a way to escape nature, that space exploration was not about leaving the Earth behind, but that humanity would one day fill the cosmos with what Earth had to offer. His driver parked the car in the billowing shadow of a tree. The Chief Designer got out and stretched, flexing the kinks out of his legs.
He tracked Mishin and Bushuyev down in the training facility, where young Giorgi—attached to so many wires and tubes that he seemed more machine than human—ran on a treadmill. The muscles of Giorgi’s bare chest pulsed with each pump of his arms. His hair, even during the most strenuous training, kept a perfect part, as straight as the white line on a blueprint. His stride was casual, his breathing even.
“How long has he been going?” asked the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev exchanged a glance.
One of them
said, “We stopped keeping track after an hour.”
“An hour!”
The Chief Designer looked back at Giorgi. Maybe he really was a machine. But even better. None of the Chief Designer’s machines functioned nearly so well.
Giorgi saw the Chief Designer and waved, raising the tangle of wires attached to electrodes on his arm. He smiled around the clear plastic tube clutched in his mouth. Giorgi was always grinning, and the expression only grew the harder he ran. On the monitor, the Chief Designer watched Giorgi’s pace increase while his heart rate remained the same. Giorgi’s feet struck the rubber track toes first, his calves bouncing him back up as if they were loaded with springs. Tap tap tap tap tap. His steps landed with the consistency of a metronome.
The rest of the equipment rested unused, metal frames like the bones of prehistoric beasts. The gyroscope, which looked like a cross between a medieval torture device and a model of the solar system, rings hinged one inside the other, the innermost jutted with handles and footholds to secure the cosmonauts as technicians set the whole contraption spinning along several axes at once, dominated the center of the room. Its only function was to test how a cosmonaut handled dizziness. A circle had been cut in the carpet around the gyroscope’s base. It had proved much easier to clean vomit from bare concrete than from the fabric of the carpet. Giorgi, though, had never been sick even once during the training.
The room had three white walls and one, opposite the door, covered with a detailed mural depicting the faces of the first four cosmonauts and a glorified version of the R-7, the painting much prettier than the actual rocket, like the propaganda illustrations Ignatius distributed to the press. There was already the outline of a fifth head, which the Chief Designer assumed would soon become that of Leonid. The mural had been Giorgi’s idea and was the product of his own talents. On his first day at Star City, he had entered the training room, looked around once, and declared, “What a drab place! Chief Designer, surely you’ll let me beautify it for you.” The Chief Designer hrmphed, not agreeing but not outright forbidding it. That was enough for Giorgi, who the next day, when he had a free minute in the rigid training schedule, managed to acquire paint and brushes and laid the first few streaks of color in a room that for half a decade had been nothing but white and gray. The scent of fresh paint merged with the room’s usual stench of sweat.
There was a time when the whole room would have been full of cosmonauts in training, each strapped in and wired up, surrounded by a hive of buzzing technicians. The original five cosmonauts, sometimes their twins, and then Giorgi, yet to launch and twinless. The Chief Designer’s youngest and best cosmonaut candidate yet. The Chief Designer regarded him like a son, loved him like he had no one else since . . .
“He reminds me of Nadya,” said the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev exchanged a look.
“He’s certainly as capable physically,” said one of them.
“Though his personality,” said the other, “is considerably warmer.”
“Did you never meet Nadya’s twin?” The Chief Designer whispered this.
Mishin and Bushuyev went rigid. They had known the other Nadya better than anyone, and it was taboo to mention the twins outside of the private depths of the Chief Designer’s office.
“She was like that,” said the Chief Designer. “If sadder.”
He gazed at one of the unoccupied treadmills.
“Giorgi is ready,” said the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev visibly relaxed.
“Yes,” said one of them.
“But our ship is not.” Pain flared in the scar on the Chief Designer’s head. He ground his artificial molars together until it subsided. “We need a launch in six months, before the General Designer can ground-test Proton.”
Mishin and Bushuyev tensed again.
“But, Chief Designer,” said one of them, “we don’t even have half a rocket assembled.”
The other, “Not to mention the issues with the ablative heat . . .”
The Chief Designer snapped, “Don’t tell me what we can’t do.”
Giorgi looked over. He faced forward again and ran faster.
“Let’s not argue in front of the children,” said the Chief Designer. “Giorgi may be ready, but we’re not ready for him. Ignore the heat shield. Just get me a rocket assembled in six months.”
Mishin and Bushuyev leaned in. “We don’t have a twin to pilot it.”
“Not for Giorgi, but we have a whole roomful of twins we have yet to use.”
Giorgi whipped a towel from the treadmill’s railing and dabbed at his brow, though there was not enough sweat there to see from across the room.
* * *
• • •
THE KENNEL ERUPTED in a chorus of yips when the Chief Designer entered. A few of the dogs were running free while the rest poked their noses out of the grated doors at the front of their cages, four-by-four squares stacked along the back wall. The earthy scent of dozens of dogs crowded the air. The attendant, sitting at a low metal desk, a book spread open in front of her, looked up slowly. She leapt to her feet when she recognized the Chief Designer.
Years ago, he had visited every day, but when people replaced dogs as the first cosmonauts, his attention had been necessarily diverted. Now he saw the dogs only rarely, when his guilt seemed too much to bear, the pain of his scar throbbing, and he knew that the dogs would show him affection undiminished by time. The three uncaged dogs circled him, jumping up and putting their forepaws against his thighs. Laika, Strelka, and Kasha, the daughter of the original Kasha, who was brought to Star City with the Leonid twins—how many years ago was that—by Tsiolkovski, back when Tsiolkovski still visited.
“Chief Designer,” said the attendant.
He could not remember her name. He was not even sure that she had been the attendant the last time he’d visited the kennel. Nadya and Leonid spent much of their time caring for the dogs, every free moment it seemed, and one of them was usually here. But they would be away for weeks.
Bending down, fighting against the ache in his bad knee, he pulled the three dogs into a squirmy embrace. They licked at his neck and face, panting sour breath. He released them and laughed. He scratched each behind the ears in turn. Kasha ran to the corner and returned with a length of rope, knotted on each end. She dropped it in front of the Chief Designer. He picked it up and slung it back to the corner. The three dogs darted after it, wrestling over the prize. Kasha emerged from the scrum victorious and trotted back to the Chief Designer, Laika and Strelka jostling for position behind her.
Falling back into a seated position, the Chief Designer allowed Kasha to climb up onto his lap. She dropped the rope and twisted her head to gnaw on the knots with her molars. Her fur was pure white and thick all over, hiding her thin frame in an illusion of bulk. The Chief Designer could have lifted her with one hand.
Most of the dogs had twins in the cages, not blood relatives but animals that looked enough like one another that they could pass for identical in black and white photographs. Kasha did not, though. She had never trained to go into space. That had been the intent when Tsiolkovski brought her mother. The original Kasha was the first, in fact. But no twin could be found for her, except maybe this Kasha, her daughter. Mishin and Bushuyev, who nabbed dozens of strays and not a couple unattended family pets, could find nowhere in Moscow another dog so perfectly white, none with a tail that curled up over her back like a sickle.
In the early days, this Kasha, still a puppy, had free roam of Star City, a couple times turning up in clean rooms to the angry shrieks of engineers. She even flew with the Chief Designer to the first launch. He remembered Nadya, the one who should have died, sitting on the floor in the corner of the control bunker, wedged up against two walls at once, her bandaged left leg extended straight out in front of her. She hung her head and sloped her shoulders—the only tim
e the Chief Designer ever saw her with poor posture—like she was crying, but the stony façade of her face never broke. Kasha, who had been sniffing around the control console, saw her there, sat, and cocked her head. It was just as unusual for Kasha to be still as it was for Nadya to slouch. Kasha took tentative steps toward the corner. She nosed Nadya’s knee, licking the bandage exactly twice, and then stepped back as if considering the taste. Her tail wagged, a great fan of fur, and then she laid down, resting her head on Nadya’s thigh.
The Chief Designer almost cried then, and had nearly missed liftoff as he composed himself. He almost cried again now, remembering it.
Laika and Strelka curled up on either side of him, and he ran a hand down each of their backs. Kasha continued to gnaw at and slobber on the knots. The Chief Designer looked at the cages, at the little black noses that poked out of the grates like buttons, but he tried not to look too hard. He did not want to see the twins of these dogs at his sides, the ones who would be, like five humans before them, sentenced to die alone, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest living thing. He did not want to see them for the same reason he had difficulty looking the human cosmonauts in the eye. To do so made him feel like an executioner, stopping by the cell of the condemned.
“I’m not a heartless man,” he said to Kasha.
The dog lifted her head from the rope and considered him.
“I did what had to be done.” The scar on his head throbbed.
The attendant asked, “What was that, Chief Designer?”
The Chief Designer lifted Kasha off his lap, stood, rising on creaky joints to his full height, and brushed away some, though not all, of the white fur that clung to his pants.
“Prepare Laika, Strelka, and their backups for training,” said the Chief Designer.
“Training?”
“I believe that’s your function here.”
“Forgive me, Chief Designer. I didn’t realize there was a mission planned for the dogs.”