First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  “Duty? Half of those you listed are dead, one abandoned us long ago, and the last is responsible for the death of the first. I’m the one who is owed, not the other way around.”

  “Kasha, then.”

  Leonid looked at her. Her lips turned up in the faintest of smiles, eyes narrowed, an expression between mirth and stern seriousness. It was the look she always used to silence him, as if she knew more than him and always would. Nanny, indeed.

  Leonid waved his hand, brushing her expression aside. Today it would not work.

  “It doesn’t seem that she has much longer to be with us,” he said. “If duty is what drives me, then I’m soon to be without motivation of any sort.”

  He turned back to the dormitory and took a step in that direction. Ignatius’s hand darted from her pocket and gripped him by the sleeve. Still holding him, she orbited to his front, inches from his face. All the mirth had drained from her expression.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, know one thing: If the Chief Designer is exposed, it’s not just him that will suffer. It’s you and Nadya, Mars, Yuri, Valentina. Mishin and Bushuyev. Everyone in the whole damn program.” She gestured to several figures walking down the path toward the centrifuge. “It’ll be like Stalin all over again, except directed specifically against the only people you know.”

  “Exposed for what?” asked Leonid. His mind raced back over their conversation. He had said too much, admitting the deepest secret of the space program to Ignatius. He had been upset, and she disarmed him with feigned kindness, tricked him into confiding in her. She hadn’t even needed to drug him like the Americans in London. Ignatius had expressed no surprise, though. Even before Leonid had admitted anything, she mentioned his brother. She knew. She had known all along. A wash of panic swept through his stomach.

  She smiled again. “Leonid. I’m not an idiot. Just as you know that my job entails more than Glavlit, more than writing articles for newspapers, so, too, I know that there’s more to the space program than the public, even Khrushchev, will ever suspect.”

  “What will you do about it?”

  “The same as I’ve always done. Ensure that the articles I write celebrate Soviet glory. I’m not a threat to you. The Chief Designer is scared of me, and I suppose he should be. But it’s in my best interest that he succeed because it’s in the best interest of the Party.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “There was no specific day, but one can’t remain near something without coming to understand the inner workings.” She released his arm.

  Nadya, still distant, retraced her path, walking backward, like a film played in reverse. She took a short, comical hop at one of the paths. Stumbling back, she seemed about to fall, but quickly righted herself. She shuffled backward through the dry grass.

  “What about her?” asked Leonid. “Do you understand Nadya? I’ve spent more time with her than anyone but would never claim to know what goes on inside her head.”

  “She’s an exception. I’ve found that the best things are always exceptions.”

  “And me?”

  “You, Leonid, are the rising of the sun. The chiming of a clock. The churning tides.”

  “Predictable?”

  “But who’s complaining?”

  Nadya hopped backward again.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CENTRIFUGE SWUNG into its first loping revolution. The metal bulb that held Giorgi capped the end of a tapering tube, several meters across even at its narrow end, the fat end secured to a great metal cylinder at the axis. The whole contraption had been painted the same sickly green they used for rockets. The Chief Designer never knew where that paint had come from, or who had chosen it. One day he’d walked to the assembly facility, and found the first R-7 already painted. And then it turned up coating equipment at Star City. The centrifuge even looked a little like a rocket lain on its side. Grinding gears in the rectangular base pinched out a low whine. The pitch lifted and faded and then went silent, replaced with a toneless rush of air.

  The Chief Designer watched from the observation room, separated by a pane of glass that shuddered when the centrifuge’s capsule hurled by. He flinched a little each time, expecting the glass to shatter. The worry was not unfounded. During the centrifuge’s first test, the original window had burst apart, propelling a shard all the way through the operator’s wrist. The new glass, the Chief Designer had been guaranteed, would not shatter even under the force of a bullet.

  Mishin and Bushuyev sat at the console today, one of them incrementally twisting the black knob that controlled the speed of the spin and the other monitoring Giorgi’s vital signs, which were spit out on several strips of paper, squiggled lines that meant near nothing to the Chief Designer. A mechanical beep marked each beat of Giorgi’s heart. The beat stayed constant even as the g-forces reached what must have been an uncomfortable level. The metal of the centrifuge groaned, as if to make up for Giorgi’s silence.

  The Chief Designer leaned down and spoke into the microphone, “You’re doing well, Giorgi.”

  The speaker filled with a heavy pulled breath.

  Giorgi said, “Mishin, Bushuyev? Is that all you have?”

  One of them twisted the knob a quarter turn to the right. The change in speed did not seem like much to the Chief Designer, but as when launching a rocket, he was not in the thing itself, where he was sure the experience was different. He wondered what other jobs were like his, where one never experienced the final product. Even generals had once been soldiers themselves.

  “Much better,” said Giorgi. The words sounded forced, but the lines on his readouts bounced in a steady pattern.

  Another revolution and another. The door to the observation room clicked shut, and Ignatius was standing over the console, next to the Chief Designer.

  “I didn’t hear you enter,” said the Chief Designer.

  “I didn’t wish to distract you.”

  “And yet here you are.”

  Several more revolutions, the centrifuge stretching into a green blur. The Chief Designer and Ignatius watched in silence, their heads turning in unison to follow the motion of the capsule. Ignatius shook her head once as if she were dizzy.

  “I’m taking Nadya and Leonid,” she said. “They’ll go on a planetarium tour. The major cities. Also to two or three towns where mobile planetariums have been set up. Have you seen the mobile planetariums? They’re quite brilliant. Everything fits into a truck.”

  “I need Nadya and Leonid here,” said the Chief Designer.

  “All they ever do is care for the dogs, and now you have a team of veterinarians on hand all day and night.”

  “They have other duties.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, Leonid is currently sitting on a bench in the quadrangle. While I’m sure this is essential to Star City’s operations, surely someone else can take over for a few weeks.”

  “Is he not entitled to a moment of rest?”

  “You said he has duties.”

  The Chief Designer took the few steps to the back of the observation room. Ignatius followed.

  “I don’t believe you’re actually a writer,” said the Chief Designer, “but with the way you twist words, you should be.”

  “I could write stories like Tsiolkovski. Adventures in outer space.”

  “You shouldn’t joke about his stories. Most of us in Star City are here because we read them in our youth.”

  “I don’t joke, Chief Designer. I read them, as well. Why do you think this assignment was given to me?”

  “Certainly not for your personality.”

  “Who’s joking now?”

  The Chief Designer tapped a finger on his scar, the widest, deepest part in the middle.

  “There’s no way I can stop you from taking Nadya and Leonid?”

  “You could try, but I
have all the leverage and you have none.”

  “There’s very little that I do have. And now you take away two of the only people I can rely on.”

  “Just for a short time.”

  “Time is another thing that I lack.”

  Ignatius reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small square of paper. She held it up and inspected the front, appraising it like a jewel, and then flipped it in her fingers to face the Chief Designer. It was a photograph of Khrushchev’s dog, tiny and brown, the hair hanging off its ears twice as long as the ears themselves.

  “If one were to need a dog quite similar to this one,” said Ignatius, “wouldn’t it help to search in several cities instead of just Moscow? Nadya and Leonid will only be busy for a few hours at the planetariums. I don’t care what else they do while we travel.”

  He inspected her as he might a new component for a rocket, trying to ascertain from her appearance alone exactly how the complex machinery inside might work. “You’re helping me?”

  “I’m talking, Chief Designer. Only talking.”

  “Thank—”

  “Stop. There’s nothing else to say.”

  She reached into her coat’s other pocket and pulled out a stack of papers that had been rolled into a tube. Unrolling them, she handed the papers to the Chief Designer. They were marked at the top with the insignia of OKB-52. A brief abstract in the middle of the first page described what was to follow. The Chief Designer started to skim it, got halfway through, and then stopped to start over at the beginning. It was a report on the status of the General Designer’s ablative heat shield. Flipping through the pages, the Chief Designer found what he was looking for, a simple line graph that showed the shield’s performance through a range of temperatures. He tracked his finger along the x-axis of the graph until he found a particular number. If the graph was accurate, and if he was reading it correctly, then the General Designer’s heat shield worked. It could return a capsule safely through the atmosphere.

  “Where did you get this?” asked the Chief Designer. He retraced the graph with his finger.

  “Why do you always ask questions you know I won’t answer?” She looked up and to a corner of the room. “What’s that noise?”

  A high-pitched tone came from the direction of the centrifuge, modulating up and down.

  “Is something broken?” asked Ignatius.

  Mishin and Bushuyev laughed. The Chief Designer stepped to the console and turned a silver knob next to the speaker. The tone increased in volume.

  “Giorgi’s whistling,” said the Chief Designer. “He should barely be able to breathe, but he whistles to show us that he’s fine.”

  “I don’t recognize the tune.”

  “I think it’s ‘Korobeiniki.’ At least how ‘Korobeiniki’ would sound if you had a train parked on your chest while you whistled it.”

  “I think I prefer this version,” said Ignatius.

  A timer on the console dinged. Mishin and Bushuyev adjusted knobs on the console, clicked metal switches from up to down. New creaks and moans came from the machine as it swept by, each revolution slower than the last. The capsule crept around the circumference on the final turn, lurching to a stop in front of the gate. Giorgi whistled through the end of the tune, and then coughed into the microphone.

  “We’re done?” he asked.

  “For today,” said the Chief Designer into the microphone, “unless you have another verse.”

  Georgiu-Dezh, Russia—1964

  The last time Leonid was in Georgiu-Dezh, some fifteen years ago, it had been called Liski. He did not remember anything specific about the city, just a sense of its enormity. But now, as the train neared the station, he realized his memory was incorrect.

  The train tracks had cut through cultivated fields, grains whipping in the wind, straight lines of sugar beet stalks. Once, a field of sunflowers appeared, each angled in the same direction, lit up as if they were giving the light and the sun receiving it. The Chief Designer and everyone at Star City thought themselves special, but these flowers had reached the sky long ago. Sometimes a silo poked up in the distance, gray and indistinct, like a primitive rocket. Sometimes the steep peaked roof of a barn showed above the stalks of grain.

  Georgiu-Dezh’s buildings rose barely higher than that, a few stories at most. The bulk of the town consisted of houses crammed right up against each other, some even sharing chimneys. The train slowed. A horse drew a carriage away from the train station. A carriage! The roads were paved with loose stones, if they were paved at all. The only structures of any significance were a factory, several kilometers away, its stacks lofting like monuments, heaving out black smoke, and an old sobor, white-walled, the four onion domes on the corners shimmering blue, the one in the center gold.

  Leonid had expected a small version of Moscow, but this, this was barely a city at all, just a group of people who all happened to settle in the same place.

  The wheels pinched out a final screech, and the train halted in front of a long platform, the wood of the planks gray with age. A boxy ticket booth made of the same wood sprouted from the platform. A long, low warehouse stretched parallel to the tracks, sections of its roof patched with mismatched shingles. Leonid shut his eyes, trying to bring the reality of this place, Georgiu-Dezh, into harmony with his memory of Liski. That was a boy’s memory, a boy who had never been outside his tiny mountain village, who had never seen any human thing taller than a hut. Then came Moscow, shattering his idea of scale. And then when he watched Nadya launch, the other Nadya, the power of the rocket diminished even a mighty city to a speck.

  Several men clustered on the platform, shifting back and forth, glancing at the door of one train car, then the next, then the next. They wore fine suits, or what passed for fine in a town such as this, the kind of suit bought on their one trip to Moscow years ago, now too small in the waist, too heavy for the weather, the color faded.

  The first passengers disembarked, locals who headed straightaway through the gates into the outskirts of the city. Then came visitors, taking two or three deliberate steps away from the train before pausing, looking around as if for a familiar landmark, finding none, and only then moving on. Last came the families, parents herding packs of half-wild children, like trying to contain an explosion.

  A hand on his shoulder drew Leonid’s attention away from the window. He had almost forgotten that Ignatius was there, and Nadya, too. The whole trip had passed in near silence.

  “Let’s go,” said Ignatius, “before they start loading the next set of passengers.”

  Leonid had no bags, just the coat to his uniform, which he flipped on and shrugged over his shoulders. The medals clinked together. He had forgotten some of their names and made up his own, like The Soviet Order of Exploding Stars and Little Metal Lenin Face. He followed Ignatius and Nadya outside.

  The same several men were still on the platform, glancing from car to car with frantic energy. When Nadya stepped through the door, they let out a collective sigh. They were the greeting party, probably the mayor and a party representative and then other city officials with unclear titles. Leonid drew himself away from the window. He was the last person off the train, save the conductor, who leaned out the side of the engine, fanning himself with his cap.

  Nadya, Ignatius, and Leonid lined up facing the greeters, the oldest of whom snapped a quick salute. Surely an old soldier, one who had seen real fighting. Leonid had learned to recognize combat veterans by the sad but respectful way they looked at his uniform. Their eyes were always drawn down to the fabric, as if it were woven from memory itself. This particular veteran focused on the epaulets, always looking just to either side of Leonid’s face.

  The shortest of the men, wearing a too-small felt bowler, stepped forward and spread his arms.

  “Greetings,” he said, “and welcome to Georgiu-Dezh! I’m Mayor Osinov. And this is
. . .”

  The Mayor listed off names that Leonid forgot even as he heard them. Instead, he named the men as he had his medals; there was Bear Beard and The Bespectacled Twig and Browncoat, the old soldier. Out of respect for his position, Leonid let the mayor just be Mayor.

  But god, the Mayor was a talker. After the introductions, he babbled on, not allowing Ignatius time to introduce herself. He explained the lodging situation for the evening and now seemed to be regaling them with the whole history of the city, even prehistory, starting with the nomadic tribes that used to live here during the Ice Age. The Mayor spoke an excited sentence that ended with “. . . mastodon!” He took a breath. Ignatius jumped forward.

  “Thank you so much for greeting us in person. The official dinner’s tonight, yes? After our cosmonauts visit the planetarium?” She shook each man’s hand in turn. “For now, could you please take us to our rooms? I’m afraid Leonid never sleeps on trains. Though he’s too proud to admit it, he could probably use a nap.”

  She forced out an artificial laugh. Leonid did not trust such a laugh, but it seemed enough for the greeters, who joined her in laughing, all but the Mayor, who frowned, obviously ready to share more stories that he would now have to wait all the way until evening to tell.

  Leonid took two strong strides forward, stopping directly before the Mayor. He shook the Mayor’s hand.

  “Thank you, Mayor,” said Leonid. “I look forward to spending time with you at dinner this evening.”

  The Mayor beamed, stammering in response, “Yes, yes. Of course. Yes.”

  One of the men, Bear Beard, ushered Nadya, Ignatius, and Leonid in the direction of the hotel, leaving the other three men to linger on the platform. Ignatius halted and turned back.

  “Excuse me,” she shouted over the clamor of the train yard. “Does this city have many stray dogs?”

  * * *

  • • •