First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  “Yes, Mr. Khrushchev.”

  “This is very exciting. Very exciting.”

  Khrushchev summoned his bodyguards and walked away down the hall.

  Nadya asked, “Will we really launch Kasha?”

  “I don’t know if we can avoid it.”

  The Chief Designer looked down and saw tears in Nadya’s eyes. She had never, as far as he knew, cried in front of anyone. He had doubted until right then that she was capable of crying at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CHIEF DESIGNER unlocked the door to the radio room, entered, and locked it behind him. He flipped on the light and jumped back at the sight of Mars already at the console.

  “You were here in the dark?” asked the Chief Designer.

  Mars looked up at the overhead light, blinking his eyes deliberately. “I didn’t even notice. It’s been several days since I last slept. I think I thought my eyes were closed.”

  The Chief Designer rested his hand on Mars’s shoulder. “After this you’ll sleep, yes?”

  “I don’t want to leave him alone.”

  “I’ll take the next two orbits, and Mishin and Bushuyev after that.”

  “I’ll try to sleep.”

  “It doesn’t look like you have a choice. Your eyes are barely open even now.”

  The Chief Designer turned on the radio console. The gentle hum of its electronics filled the quiet of the room.

  “It’s risky to talk to him, you know,” said the Chief Designer. “The Americans are surely listening, not to mention the operators at our own stations. Are you using encryption?”

  “Zarya is functioning properly.”

  “How’s Leonid doing?”

  “You know the twins. It’s as if they talk in riddles sometimes. Leonid is as much a part of the machinery of Vostok as the switches and wires. Now for the first time he has time to think about who he is. His existence is no longer limited to only training and action. He’s a machine manufacturing a philosophy based on the very limited life he’s lived.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a philosopher yourself.”

  “I’ve let myself become trapped up there with him.”

  The radio crackled. Underneath the static, a faint organic sound repeated. It grew stronger and clearer. A human voice. It asked over and over, Hello?

  “Hello, Leonid. It’s the Chief Designer.”

  “Is Mars not there?”

  “I’m here, too,” said Mars.

  “I’ve been saying hello,” said Leonid, “for several minutes. I forgot to note the time when we last lost communication, so I didn’t know when I would again be in range. Also, I’ve begun to distrust the clock. It wasn’t made to run for so long.”

  “The clock is fine,” said the Chief Designer.

  “That’s good to know. It’ll save me several dozen hellos on the next orbit. All of my supplies are limited, and I suspect I have only so many greetings at my disposal, as well. With infinity literally all around me, the idea of shortage is one that’s difficult to deal with. It’s not that I don’t have everything I could possibly ever need, it’s that I can’t reach it. I remember being a boy, very small, unable to reach something on the table. What possibly could I have been reaching for? The memory of the thing is gone, but I remember wanting it so badly. I remember my short arms. I remember lifting up on my toes, pushing against the floor with them as hard as I could. I was young enough to believe that my will alone would let me achieve the goal. The goal of reaching the forgotten thing on the table.

  “Do you know what my brother did? He pushed a chair up to the table and climbed from it to the top and got the thing I wanted. He dropped it down to me. I don’t remember the thing, but I remember my brother standing there, and I thought he was so tall, but we have always been the same height. He was no taller, even though he could reach farther.

  “So I wonder. I think these things to be out of reach, the resources I need to survive and all the hellos I have yet to speak, but perhaps I’ve just not yet thought to use a chair. The infinite is infinite, but the extent of our reach is ingenuity. I strained against my limitations, but my brother knew to ignore the limitations entirely. My brother, how is he?”

  “He just returned home today,” said the Chief Designer.

  “To Bohdan? How’s Grandmother?”

  “No, he’s barely closer to Bohdan than you are. He returned to Star City.”

  “Tsiolkovski was the first to tell us Star City was home, but I was never able to convince myself entirely. Here, in my little metal ball, I feel more at home than I ever did there. No offense intended, Chief Designer.”

  “This doesn’t offend me at all. Most days, I, too, wish to leave Star City and return to my actual home. Months go by when I don’t see my wife or boy.”

  “You have a family?”

  “I’m supposed to be only a title, Chief Designer, so my family is a secret, even from my staff. I figure there is no harm in telling you. Not because of your . . . situation, but because you have proven, for even longer than the other cosmonauts, that you can keep a secret.”

  “And me?” asked Mars.

  The Chief Designer placed his hand on Mars’s shoulder. “You, Mars, are too sleepy to remember any of this tomorrow.”

  Mars brushed the Chief Designer’s hand away with an emotive flare.

  “I’m not so feebleminded as that,” said Mars.

  The men laughed, but not loudly or for long.

  Leonid spoke into the silence that followed, “Can I share a secret of my own?”

  “Of course, Leonid,” said the Chief Designer.

  “I don’t remember her name, my grandmother. She, too, is only a title.”

  “Tsiolkovski told it to me when he brought you here. I made a point to remember. I felt that I should honor her sacrifice at least that much.”

  “Do you think my brother remembers her name?”

  “If not, and if he ever asks, I’ll remind him.”

  “Will you remind me now?”

  The Chief Designer leaned close to the microphone and whispered her name.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTERNOON GAVE WAY to evening and the staff filtered out of the party. Glasses lay sideways and overturned on the tables, even on chairs and the floor. The whole room reeked of spilled spirits. The only ones left were the three cosmonauts, Nadya, Leonid, and Giorgi, sitting on the floor, leaning against Giorgi’s mural on the back wall of the room. Kasha curled in Nadya’s lap. Nadya hummed a simple melody, and Giorgi sometimes pitched in a harmony.

  “Let’s play table tennis,” said Giorgi.

  “I can’t even stand,” said Leonid.

  “That’ll make it easier to defeat you.”

  “You say that as if you’ve had difficulty defeating me in the past.”

  “But you at least offer more of a challenge than the rest of them.”

  But the real challenge had come from Leonid’s twin, who would play with Giorgi on breaks from their training. Because of this, Mishin and Bushuyev had unveiled a new table tennis table in the windowless common room of the dorm where the earthbound twins resided, half in hiding, half in waiting. By that point, it was only Leonid who still lived there. Nadya would visit almost every day, but she had taken up her sister’s old dorm room. Mars lived in his brother’s. Valentina and Yuri had moved out into real homes long ago. They had left this life behind, escaped in a way Nadya and Mars seemed unable. Leonid envied Valentina and Yuri that.

  So since childhood, Leonid had spent his days waiting for Mishin and Bushuyev to come take him to training. There was no set schedule that Leonid could decipher, his training days always a surprise. His brother would go into hiding, and Leonid would learn the things his brother already knew, though never quite as well. Much of Leonid’s
energy was spent simply remembering the names of the people his brother interacted with every day. Yes, he learned the controls of Vostok, but he knew he would never remember them well enough to pilot the thing himself.

  In the meantime, he practiced table tennis for at least an hour a day, sometimes with Mishin and Bushuyev, sometimes against the wall, until he played well enough to pass for his brother in a casual match. Leonid admitted to himself that table tennis was one of his few actual pleasures. With the racket in his hand, concentrating on the ball, he was able to escape his own mind, projecting himself into the action so that the only part of him that existed was motion and response. As much as he might enjoy it, Leonid also knew that he was no match for Giorgi, who the Chief Designer claimed might have played in international competitions had he not joined the military.

  “How about tomorrow?” asked Leonid. “I now have no official duties for the foreseeable future. Maybe I can finally practice enough to win.”

  “Tomorrow, then!” Giorgi picked up the nearest bottle and held it upside down. “I think we’re out of vodka.”

  “The bottles may be empty, but I’m still full of the stuff.”

  Giorgi set the bottle on its side and rolled it across the room. Kasha leapt from Nadya’s lap and trotted after it, catching up just before it impacted the far wall. She tried to bite the fat part of the bottle, but even with her mouth wide open her teeth clicked futilely against the glass. She bit the neck next, positioning her head to get a grip on it with her molars. Each time she tried to lift the bottle, it slipped free after it rose only centimeters off the ground. After a few attempts she stepped back, tilting her head from side to side, looking from one end of the bottle to the other. She went back to the neck, crouched in front of it, and latched her front teeth around the lip of the bottle’s mouth. Without attempting to lift the bottle, she scuttled slowly backward, dragging it in Giorgi’s direction.

  “Such a clever girl,” said Giorgi.

  Kasha’s progress was slow, almost painfully so. Leonid wanted to get up and help her, but he was still unsure of his ability to stand. And Kasha seemed so determined. He felt like she would be upset if anyone offered any help at all.

  “Why do you think she does it?” said Nadya.

  “What do you mean?” asked Giorgi.

  “Chase after a bottle. Or a stick. What compels her?”

  “Instinct, I suppose.”

  The bottle scooted, tinking against the floor.

  “My father gave up church like everyone after the Revolution,” said Nadya. “There was no church to go to anyway. I’ve heard that there were still priests in smaller towns and villages, but it was like they disappeared overnight in the city. My father, with no church to attend, who explained to us why religion was false, a silly superstition, he kept an icon in his dresser. He would mumble to himself. That’s what he would call it when we caught him, ‘mumbling.’ But I heard him once before he noticed me, and what he mumbled was a prayer. I barely knew what prayer was, and it seemed strange and magical what he said. I knew the words, they were common enough, maybe not the word god, that one I had not heard used very much, if at all. ‘Papa,’ I said. He turned and saw me, and he blushed and I felt myself blush, too, like we’d both just discovered each other’s most embarrassing secret. He told me he’d just been mumbling again, and I told him it was okay if he mumbled. Not long after that, Tsiolkovski came.”

  “Let’s not dwell in the past,” said Leonid.

  It was dangerous to say too much around Giorgi, who did not know the whole truth about the twins. He was not even supposed to know that they had been recruited as children, but Mars drunkenly spilled that secret one night in front of Giorgi and a number of engineers, most of whom had disappeared from Star City shortly thereafter.

  “There’s no shame in celebrating our histories,” said Giorgi. “Our past is the only sure cause of our present.”

  “All I meant to say,” said Nadya, “is that sometimes I mumble myself. I don’t know about god, but it’s an instinct, of sorts.”

  “You two have been to the heavens themselves, so I’ll trust your opinion on the matter of gods.”

  Leonid said, “One need not have been to space to know for sure there’s no such thing as a creator. In fact, it’s easier to see that from right here on the ground.”

  Kasha finished her bottle-laden trek across the room. She stopped, panted several times, and nosed the bottle to Giorgi’s feet.

  Bohdan, Ukraine—1950

  In school, before the teacher went away, the Leonids had been taught that there was no such thing as god. Science had all the answers, and it was hard to argue. If the magic that had allowed the fleets of warplanes to fly overhead could be explained by science, then the Leonids were sure that anything could. When such a plane carried their father away but failed to carry him back, it was not the failure of a miracle, or the triumph of an enemy’s miracle—guns that could launch bullets from the ground halfway up to heaven—over their own. It was simply the science of a plane that it could not fly with one wing shot off. No false comfort in that, no false hope.

  Sunday morning came, barely different from any other morning of the week. The boys woke and moved from their shared bed to the table, just a few steps away. Grandmother had laid out two pieces of dry, black bread, moistened just enough by a thin spread of watered-down butter to be edible. The boys ate the bread and drank a cup of water each. They were still hungry after breakfast, but they had gotten used to being hungry. Sometimes they would ask for another cup of water. Drink enough and it gave the illusion of being full.

  The twins changed from their bedclothes to old pairs of pants, sturdy but threadbare at the knees, and donned their oldest, dingiest shirts. The fabric had always been a light shade of brown, but now it was threatening black. They put on their shoes by the door and were almost outside when Grandmother called them back.

  “How about a prayer before you go?” she asked.

  “You know we’re not supposed to pray,” said the older Leonid.

  “Who says? Do you see a red soldier here with a gun and a book of rules making sure we follow each one?”

  “But there’s no god to pray to,” said the younger Leonid.

  “Maybe it’s not who you pray to,” said Grandmother, “but who you pray with that matters.”

  “Grandmother,” said the older Leonid, “we have to go. They’re expecting us.”

  “Go, go,” said Grandmother, shooing them away like she sometimes did to Kasha when the dog tried to come inside. “I don’t want to implicate you in my illegal activities.”

  The twins shuffled out, one after the other through the narrow front door. Grandmother sat with her elbows on the table, hands folded in front of her.

  “Is it really illegal?” asked the younger Leonid once the twins were away from the cottage.

  “Grandmother’s right,” said the older. “Who is there to stop her? Let her pray if she wants.”

  “But I don’t want her to be arrested. Do you remember when they came and took Mr. Shvets away? It was the middle of the night and the whole village awoke to the sounds of Mrs. Shvets shouting at the soldiers. I remember Mykola standing beside her. He was silent, but weeping.”

  “When was the last time you saw a soldier? They only did such things when they first came, and then they left.”

  “What if they come again?”

  “Grandmother’s wise enough not to be caught praying if they do.”

  They walked the dusty trail between their cottage and the rest of the village, where the Tarasenkos lived. Mr. Tarasenko had injured his back the day before, in the middle of repairing their cottage’s exterior wall, replacing rotted clapboards. Colder weather was just ahead, and now there was a hole right through the wall to the inside. As the twins approached, they could see the Tarasenkos waiting at the table, sipping hot drinks from mugs.
Probably not tea. Most of the village had been steeping tree bark instead. No tea leaves had arrived on the train in over a year.

  It was just Mrs. and Mr. Tarasenko in the cottage, both of the same generation as Grandmother. They had a son, supposedly a great friend of Father’s, and like Father, he’d disappeared through the mountain pass on the train. What left on the train never returned. When the twins were younger, the Tarasenkos were frequent guests, arriving with sweetcakes and hearty laughs. Now, though they were still friendly, they seldom visited. But it was not just them. No one seemed to have time for things like that anymore, even though everyone had more time on their hands.

  The Tarasenkos saw the twins through the hole in the wall. Mrs. Tarasenko rose from the table and greeted them outside. She was a small woman, shrunk even more in recent years, and her dress, yellowed and tattered, fell shapeless around her like a collapsed tent. Her smile revealed several missing teeth, black gaps in almost perfect squares. She led the twins around to the side of the cottage. The twins greeted Mr. Tarasenko through the hole in the wall, and he grunted in response.

  “Don’t mind him,” said Mrs. Tarasenko. “He’s just upset that he needs you boys to help. He’s too proud to be grateful.”

  “I can hear you,” said Mr. Tarasenko.

  “It’s good to know that your ears work better than your back.”

  She laughed, a cackle really. Mr. Tarasenko turned to her. The twins had expected anger, but he was fighting back a smile. He sipped from his mug and turned back to face the table.

  “Thank you, boys,” he said.

  Mrs. Tarasenko showed the Leonids where the new clapboards could be found, and then instructed them in how to properly hang them. She and one of the twins would each support an end while the other twin hammered in the first few nails that held the board in place. The fresh wood of the new boards, sap still seeping out along the grain, looked as bright and yellow as a fresh-bloomed flower compared to the weathered gray of the old ones. The project only took an hour, the top of the sun just cresting the eastern mountains as they finished.