First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  “So we’ll start the fueling process at five in the morning. The first crews will be at the pad by four.”

  “I rarely make it home, and I miss the river.” Nedelin turned from the General Designer to the rest of the table. “All I asked him was what time the test would occur. Ten minutes later, I’m not sure I have the answer to that question, but I do now feel qualified to construct a rocket all by myself.”

  The Chief Designer chuckled and Ignatius unleashed a full-throated haw. The aides turned their faces in whatever direction but toward the General Designer, whose cheeks blossomed with red. He looked around the room as if noticing the other people for the first time.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” said Nedelin to the Chief Designer. “This group is always so serious before a test. They won’t even join me for a drink.” He glanced around the tabletop. “They don’t even have a drink to offer.”

  The General Designer stuttered something in response but failed to form an actual word. This made the Chief Designer laugh again. He had never seen his rival so flustered. He wondered if Nedelin needled the General Designer like this all the time, or if it was just with this particular audience. Nedelin was a tactician, after all, and what better way to gain control over the General Designer than to diminish his esteem just that much.

  Ignatius reached into the deep pocket of her leather jacket, which hung from the back of the chair almost all the way to the floor. She pulled out an unmarked bottle filled with clear liquid.

  “I’m more than glad to join you for a drink,” said Ignatius, “I can’t speak for the Chief Designer.”

  “I know your face, but I don’t recall your name,” said Nedelin.

  “You’ve never known it, Marshal. I’m an agent of Glavlit.”

  “Oh? Then I guess I never will. Is there at least a name I can call you?”

  “Ignatius.”

  “A saint! As much as a Jesuit can be a saint.”

  “Or a saint a soldier.” She half-stood from her seat and stretched her arm across the table, offering a glass of vodka to Nedelin. “Who else?” she asked.

  The General Designer did not respond, nor did any of his aides. The Chief Designer tapped two fingers on the table. She filled his glass to brimming.

  The young man with glasses raised his hand. Ignatius grabbed the nearest glass, from in front of another of the aides, and filled it halfway. She passed it to the left, and it was handed from aide to aide to the General Designer to Nedelin before it reached its destination.

  “Only the four of us?” asked Ignatius. “That’s all right. I only brought one bottle.”

  She raised her glass. “To the engineers gathered here, and to all who give themselves to this great Soviet . . . no, this great human project. To our engineers.”

  She, Nedelin, the Chief Designer, and the young aide raised their glasses, and the rest of those seated at the table scrambled to find an empty glass to raise as well. The staggered response came: “To our engineers.”

  The Chief Designer had always enjoyed the sound of glasses being set back on a table after a toast. It reminded him of a gunshot before a race, a signal that things could finally begin. He held his glass high and set it down last.

  “So, Ignatius,” said Nedelin, “why the name of a saint?”

  “I prefer to think of him as an educator. Anyway”—she pointed up—“one would need to believe in a god to believe in saints.”

  “A good state atheist, then?”

  “Does that mean you aren’t?”

  “I don’t believe in the old god, comrade, but not because the party told me so. I saw the holy die just as easily as the damned on the battlefield. Easier even. It’s more difficult to give up if one doesn’t believe in a second chance. It’s the same human greed that keeps us alive as makes us believe we can live forever.”

  “And now we fly our cosmonauts to the front door of heaven, knock, and find it vacant.”

  “Is that why we fly?”

  “The birds have never offered up a reason, why must we?”

  The curtain hung in front of the doorway to the kitchen parted, and a line of servers emerged carrying plates full of food. The men were locals, Turkic. When Baikonur had been founded, the Chief Designer had been forbidden from hiring locals for any sensitive position, though what qualified as sensitive had never been defined. The specter of Stalin still loomed, when all the designers had to hide their Jewish engineers from his gaze, when Asian members of their staffs seemed to disappear weekly. And for all his genius, what of Tsiolkovski . . .

  The General Designer cleared his throat. “We fly to conquer. There’s a realm we have not yet claimed, and we, as a species, must claim it. First, we conquered the idea of a god, and now we lay claim to where we imagined his home to be.”

  “And I thought I was the military man at the table,” said Nedelin.

  “We do what it takes to survive,” said the Chief Designer. “It isn’t about conquering, it’s about enduring.”

  “Do you mean the species or yourself?” said the General Designer.

  “The same could be asked of you.”

  “We got rid of god,” said Nedelin, “and yet these two men try to claim his title.”

  The General Designer grunted and looked down at the table.

  “They used to say the same about Tsiolkovski,” said the Chief Designer.

  A reverent hush overtook the table at the mention of Tsiolkovski’s name. The servers arranged the plates, reaching through the narrow gaps between those seated, managing not to bump shoulders or brush sleeves. The Chief Designer admired their coordination, the machinery of it. Never once did two plates clink against one another. The server nearest him set down a dish with pickles and another with sliced pumpernickel and pork fat. Three large bowls, arranged evenly around the table, contained cold cucumber salad, the other ingredients completely drowned in thick white smetanka. Then came the individual bowls of cold borscht. No one even had time to raise a spoon for the soup before another wave of servers arrived with the main course, some sort of poached river fish crisscrossed on top with whole sprigs of dill.

  Nedelin raised his glass. “To Tsiolkovski. Maybe a man, maybe a saint, maybe a god, maybe all three. To Tsiolkovski.”

  Everyone around the table lifted glasses, full or not. “To Tsiolkovski.”

  After the toast, the General Designer waved off a server with a pitcher of water and extended his arm across the table, empty glass held in the tips of his knobby fingers.

  He said, “Ignatius, was it? A drink if you would, and for any of my associates who would like one, as well. If you have enough.”

  “Of course.” Ignatius reached into the other pocket of her coat and pulled out a second bottle of vodka. “I made sure to bring enough for everyone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CHIEF DESIGNER, Ignatius, and Nedelin opted to walk the two kilometers from the dining room back to the dormitories. Night had set in, moonless and starry. The dirt road showed ahead of them only as a patch of black slightly smoother than the black all around it. In the distance, the lights of the dormitories clustered above the horizon like flaming engines.

  Ignatius took a swig from what remained in the bottle. Everyone at the table had ended up taking some, but none of the General Designer’s aides took much. Ignatius passed the bottle to Nedelin, who tipped it back, gulping down half the remaining vodka. He passed the bottle to the Chief Designer, who willingly finished it off.

  “What to do with the bottle,” he said.

  “Aren’t you in the business of launching things?” said Nedelin. “Send it on its way.”

  The Chief Designer clutched the bottle by its neck and hurled it into the darkness. It thudded in the dirt and then bounced into something hard. He imagined the shattering was the sound of the stars overhead.

 
The alcohol flowed as excess heat in his blood. His limbs felt weightless. He thought hard about each step as he took it.

  “What actually brings you here?” asked Nedelin.

  Ignatius had lagged behind, still within earshot but not offering much in the way of conversation. She gave no indication that she was listening but the Chief Designer knew she was.

  “I was hoping to collaborate, for once,” he said.

  “You must be truly desperate,” said Nedelin.

  “I’m just wiser. Five years ago, the General Designer had nothing to offer, but now he does.”

  “So you’ll exploit him.”

  “He’s a resource like any other.”

  “And you?”

  Ignatius stepped between them. “The Chief Designer is a resource, too, but unlike all the others.”

  Nedelin chuckled.

  “Look at the stars,” he said. “Whenever I go back to Moscow it’s like the whole sky disappears.”

  The Chief Designer craned his neck, almost stumbling backward. The largest stars shone bright as spotlights, and the fainter stars, so many of them, hazed the firmament. If his vision were not blurred by drink, could he pick out Mars? Like the stars but untwinkling, tinged dusty red.

  “In Siberia,” he said, “when the skies would actually clear, it was as if there were more stars than space between them. That one there is actually a planet. Mars. You can tell it’s a planet because it doesn’t shimmer.” He pointed up at nothing in particular.

  “To continue our conversation from dinner,” said Nedelin, “this beauty—we can all agree that the night sky is beautiful?”

  “Yes,” said the Chief Designer.

  “Agreed,” said Ignatius.

  “Isn’t it better if beauty is a natural state with no need of a guiding hand to create it? Because we’re a species of painters, we assume that all beauty must be similarly created. But weren’t the first paintings just copies of nature? Isn’t the sky itself full of every symmetry and color? Why do we feel the need to make the source of our aesthetic have a source? At what point is the source sourceless?”

  “Marshal,” said the Chief Designer, “I feel I’ve drunk too much to follow you completely. I didn’t know the army trained philosophers.”

  “In Stalingrad, there were no lights. We burned no fires. Only stars, when the smoke from smoldering rubble did not cloud things up too badly. Being a soldier there was to be suspended between the ugliness of war and the splendor of the sky. And one’s only occupation between skirmishes was to think.”

  The Chief Designer thought of Leonid, locked in the Vostok far above them, a speck coursing through the static backdrop of stars. Leonid spoke in the same sort of poetry as Nedelin.

  The three of them had stopped walking, each gazing up at a different section of sky. There were no insects to chirp, no trees where a night bird might perch. The breeze came only as a faint sensation against the skin.

  “I apologize,” said Nedelin. “I seem to have turned the mood somber.”

  “Sometimes I feel that somber is the natural mood,” said the Chief Designer, “but we manage to turn it light now and again.”

  They resumed walking. The Chief Designer welcomed the sound of the crunching gravel beneath their feet. The lights of the dormitories never seemed to get nearer when he watched but were always somehow closer when he looked again. Then they arrived.

  The dried-up remains of saxauls sprouted from either side of the road where it entered the residential complex, two dormitories simply called Dom 2 and Dom 4. The Chief Designer did not know where Doms 1 and 3 might be, if they existed at all. A single wild apple tree in the center quadrangle had managed to survive. Nedelin said good night without stopping and continued to Dom 2. The Chief Designer and Ignatius were left alone with the few lights still alive in the windows. He remembered a similar evening with his wife after they were first married, before his son was born. It might have been the very night his son was conceived. But this woman was not his wife. Was his wife even his wife anymore? He had not seen her in so long.

  “I thought you were with Nadya and Leonid,” said the Chief Designer.

  “We finished the assignment.”

  “Did you find one? Did you find a dog like Kasha or Khrushchev’s Byelka?”

  “Many dogs, but none that matched. Part of me hopes that Khrushchev’s little rat is a singular entity. Hell if there are more of them.”

  “Then you didn’t finish the assignment.”

  “I don’t work for you, Chief Designer. I’m happy to help out when I can, but don’t confuse me for Mishin or Bushuyev.”

  “I can never tell where the limits of your caring lie.”

  “It will be easier for you if you accept that I don’t really care at all. I have a role and I perform it and I don’t give it much thought beyond that.”

  “I can never tell if that role is to thwart me or to aid me.”

  “Neither. My role is to motivate you.”

  “And the General Designer, too?”

  “You’re a little easier to deal with, Chief Designer. The General Designer, he has no memory of the gulag. He never suffered like you did, and so he can’t understand loss as you do. I get my way with you far more often than I should, because I scare you. Don’t misunderstand me. You should be scared. So should the General Designer. I’m not praising him, just pointing out how ignorance works in his favor. At least in the short term.”

  “And in the long term?”

  “One of you will go to Mars, and I’ll back whoever can get there first.”

  “You’re here to watch the engine test, then?”

  “I end up where I need to be. And I have faith that you will as well.”

  “Faith?”

  “It seems the old gods aren’t quite as dead as Nedelin believes. Good night, Chief Designer.”

  As she walked away, she pulled a third, full bottle of vodka from her jacket pocket and pried out the cork.

  * * *

  • • •

  BY THE TIME the Chief Designer arose in the morning, the dormitories were already empty. He showered, lingering in the stream of water even though it was cold. The dining hall was dark and abandoned, but he found the remains of a black bread loaf in the kitchen pantry. He searched the drawers, metal things with squeaking brackets, until he found a suitable knife. Gripping the loaf with a cloth napkin, he set the blade on the exposed end and sawed lightly until the serration worked a groove in the crust. The knife was sharp. It did not take much pressure. He went slowly and lightly, trying to finish the slice without crushing the rest of the loaf. It was a small challenge he made for himself, to complete this one task with no unnecessary damage. He poured himself a glass of water and ate the bread plain.

  Outside, morning light preceded the rising sun, turning both sky and ground the same orange. Clouds, mere wisps, streaked the sky with a lighter hue. The atmosphere quivered at the horizon. Launch towers poked up in the distance like limbless tree trunks, a sparse forest. The Chief Designer walked toward the tower twinned by the Proton rocket. It was several kilometers away, but he had plenty of time to get to the bunker before the summer heat grew too oppressive.

  The Chief Designer hummed a tune as he walked. He did not know the name of the song or the words, but the tune was simple and pleasant. Giorgi often sang it in the evenings. To the Chief Designer, it seemed more appropriate for mornings. Some birds sing at dawn and others at dusk. In Baikonur, of course, no birds sang at all. Or maybe they did. The Baikonur Cosmodrome was actually hundreds of kilometers away from the city of the same name, the title a sleight of hand aimed at the Americans. The Chief Designer knew it had taken but a single flight of the U-2 to uncover the ruse.

  The bunker came into sight over a tangle of brown brush. Half buried, the bunker looked like the remains of a devastated castle. Several
small figures emerged from the door and hurried toward the rocket. As he got closer, the Chief Designer could see the activity around the rocket itself, a swarm of bug-sized people moving in frantic patterns in front of the pad. When the light came through the latticework of the tower at the proper angle, still more technicians could be seen clinging to the platforms. Ants on the stalk of a plant.

  Inside the bunker, technicians played with their control panels. No one seemed to notice when the Chief Designer entered. He cleared his throat, hoping for any sort of acknowledgment. He had planned to wait for the test in the bunker, but now it felt unwelcoming. He left and continued down the dirt road in the direction of the Proton.

  He had not made it far when the General Designer almost ran into him, his face toward the ground, walking fast in the other direction. The General Designer smoked a long, thin cigarette, exhaling a continuous line of smoke behind him like a steam trail above a train.

  “Sorry, sorry,” said the General Designer without looking up, shuffling to the side to move around the Chief Designer.

  “Isn’t your work in the other direction?” asked the Chief Designer. “And should you really be smoking?”

  The General Designer looked up. A slight flush came to his cheeks.

  “If you must know,” he said, “some combination of my nerves and last night’s vodka has necessitated that I seek out a toilet.”

  The Chief Designer chuckled. “Please, don’t let me keep you. Is Nedelin at the launchpad?”

  “Yes, yes.” The General Designer hurried away. His gait was an awkward shuffle, as if by pressing his buttocks together he could hold the shit inside. It was not so different from his normal walk, thought the Chief Designer. Except that the General Designer never seemed to stop spewing shit from the other end. The Chief Designer tried to banish such thoughts. He was here for a favor, and thinking ill of the man from whom the favor was asked would be of no benefit. And the General Designer, to his credit, had been almost civil. Almost human. Maybe this would work out, after all.

  A pebble kicked up into the Chief Designer’s shoe, lodging under his heel. He crouched down and tried to fish the pebble out with his finger. His knee ached. The pebble eluded him. He pried off the shoe and dumped it. The pebble, barely bigger than a grain of sand, dropped out. The Chief Designer retied his shoe and lifted himself to standing.