Konstantin

by Tom Bullough

  The children nodded, tentatively.

  ‘Now.’ He took a small metal bowl from his satchel, lit a twist of newspaper with a match and fed the fire, first with twigs, then with larger scraps of wood. ‘Most of you have probably never seen an air balloon and I myself have never seen an air balloon on any scale, but in the future this technology will certainly provide an important method of transport. As yet, it is the only form of human flight to have enjoyed any success. As long ago as 1783, two French brothers named Montgolfier had the idea to build a large silk sphere with a hole at the bottom. Beneath this hole they hung a sort of boat containing a fire to heat the air inside, and since warm air is lighter than cold air their balloon rose …’ He gestured upwards, through the branches of the apple tree, into the breeze, the clouds, the temperamental sunlight. ‘It rose to a height of 2,800 arshins!’

  Ilya raised his hand, so the teacher cupped his ear.

  ‘Did they die, sir?’

  ‘Well, on that occasion they did not travel in the boat themselves. But it was not long until they began to experiment with human passengers, and, since that time, aëronauts have risen to altitudes that even the Montgolfiers could scarcely have imagined. In 1862, a pair of Englishmen, James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell, took a balloon full of coal gas to an altitude of 16,700 arshins. That’s 4,200 arshins higher than Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world! At such a height, the air is so thin that it is almost impossible to breathe. It is bitterly cold and so dry that paper becomes crumpled, as if it has been placed before a fire! At such a height, the sky above you is almost as dark as the sky at night, and the Earth beneath you curves distinctly – as if you are looking down from space!’

  When the fire was established, Konstantin filled the bowl with pieces of charcoal and unfolded his balloon. He instructed the children to stand in a circle, to hold it in place, and once he had attached the bowl to a special wire cradle, as if witnessing a miracle he watched it swell, pitch in the breeze, rise past the apple tree, past the chimneys of the surrounding houses, and hang from its tether at a level with the domes of the cathedral.

  ‘You see?’ said Konstantin, in a distant voice. ‘The contents of the balloon are lighter than the surrounding medium.’ He looked at his pupils, who stood with their heads and caps tipped backwards, watching the white wavering spot with unconcealed amazement. He tied the string to his bench and sat back down, closing his eyes as he tried to organize his thoughts. ‘So …’ He looked up to see faces in the windows of the other classrooms. ‘Can anybody tell me? Is it possible to take a balloon all the way to the Moon?’

  There was some indecision, but one girl shook her head.

  ‘No? Why not, Marta?’

  ‘Because … there’s no air there, sir.’

  ‘That is one reason, yes,’ said the teacher. ‘Certainly a balloon cannot be lighter than nothing. But, ultimately …’ He picked up a stone and allowed it to fall back into the dust. ‘Ultimately, the problem is gravity. Buoyancy can lift us high into the atmosphere, but it will never allow us to pass into space. We are all of us gravity’s prisoners!’

  ‘Is it not possible to go into space, then?’ asked Marta, loudly.

  ‘Oh, it is possible, but only by moving at the most incredible velocity! You see … Let me see … Try to picture the Earth in your minds: an enormous ball suspended in space. Yes? Now, imagine that you are standing on the top of a mountain so tall that it pokes right through the atmosphere. You pick up a stone and throw it horizontally. What happens? Well, of course, your stone travels forwards and it falls, due to the force of gravity. For a while, it follows a curving line, but then it falls vertically, and in the end it hits the ground. Right? Well, two hundred years ago, a scientist named Isaac Newton calculated that any object thrown horizontally will fall five metres with every second that it remains in flight. He also noted that we are standing on a ball, which, of course, has a curve of its own. Indeed, from a horizontal line the surface of the Earth descends at a rate of five metres every eight kilometres. You see?’ He drew a picture in the dust. ‘Now then. Imagine again that you are standing on your mountaintop and that you throw a stone horizontally away from you, but that this time you throw your stone extremely fast. In fact, you throw your stone at eight kilometres per second. What happens then? Well, it will both fly forwards and fall, as before, but its curve will follow exactly the same curve as the surface of the Earth. It will fall five metres for every eight kilometres it travels. Effectively, it will fall for ever, spinning around the Earth, like the Moon. That speed, eight kilometres per second, is what’s called “orbital velocity” …’

  ‘How do you make something go that fast, then, sir?’ asked Nikolai. ‘With a cannon?’

  ‘And that is the question!’ the teacher exclaimed. ‘How do you make something travel so incredibly fast? Well, yes, some people have suggested that you could use a cannon – although it would need to be a cannon almost incalculably vast. To escape the Earth’s gravity altogether, you would need to fire a cannonball at 11.17 kilometres per second – that’s thirty-two times the speed of sound! And this is not the only problem. Just suppose you do manage to build such a cannon, well, you don’t want just to fire a cannonball, do you? You want to send a passenger as well. But think what would happen! To fire a cannonball big enough to contain even a single passenger, the explosion would be apocalyptic! No one could possibly survive such force! He would be crushed at once by what is known as “relative gravity” … In my own opinion, it may be possible to circumvent this problem with a cannon literally hundreds of kilometres long, stretched across the surface of the Earth, and by immersing your passenger in some kind of protective fluid, like a baby in its mother’s womb or …’ He hesitated, struggled to find his words. ‘Or, I believe that you could build a tower so tall that its head was travelling in orbit – although to be free of the Earth’s gravity, such a tower would need to be 34,000 kilometres tall! An eleventh of the distance to the Moon! With traditional materials like brick and stone the lower levels would simply collapse beneath the weight of the levels above! And then, no less importantly, even if you did manage to reach space, still you would be trapped! Because in space, there is nothing! There is no air, no ground, no water! Here on Earth, we move by pushing against the ground with our feet, but in space you would be drifting helplessly – able only to revolve about your own centre of gravity!’

  Konstantin paused and looked at his seven pupils, whose eyes had grown wary, their faces set with little frowns. He noticed his balloon, which was settling in the schoolyard, collapsing on its still-smouldering charcoal, and he jumped to his feet to remove the metal bowl.

  ‘I … I’m sorry,’ he said, returning to his bench. ‘I seem to have strayed off the point.’

  When at last two o’clock came, Konstantin gathered up his satchel and hastened back through the dusty streets – beneath plum and lime trees whose sunlit leaves were already trimmed with yellow. On Kaluzhskaya Street, he scrambled up the stairs of a house painted bright blue and white, and burst through the front door of his apartment at such a pace that a small, sand-weighted hydrogen dirigible surged away from him, spinning on the air currents. He hurried past his study, where his microscope, his barometer, his globe and his electrical dynamo made a shining line along the windowsill, stepped over the cat and arrived in Varya’s bedroom, where his father-in-law was sitting on a chair beside the bed and his wife lay propped against the pillows, a ball of linen in her arms, from the end of which protruded a tiny purple face.

  ‘My dear boy!’ exclaimed the priest, embracing him fiercely, covering his face with slippery kisses. ‘This is wonderful, wonderful!’

  ‘Thank you …’ Konstantin managed. ‘Thank you, Yevgraf Nikolaievich.’

  He turned to Varya, who was watching him, smiling, deep blue lines beneath her eyes. Her head lolled forwards, so that the folds beneath her chin met the sparse brown hairs on the baby’s still-pointed head.

  ‘Is … everyt
hing all right? Is she … ?’

  He sat down on the bed, leant towards them.

  ‘Here,’ she said, softly.

  Delicately, Konstantin collected his daughter and lay her on his forearm so that her head was enclosed by his hand. The baby stared back at him with miniature blue eyes between half-closed lids, the slight trace of eyebrows, wet lips parted round a tiny tongue, a forehead puckered as if she had just spent the morning in the bath-house. He smelt milk on her breath, the tang of fresh blood. He felt her heat, which seemed to him somehow not to be the heat of a separate body, but rather to be emanating from himself.

  ‘Have you … thought about names?’ called his wife, after a time.

  Konstantin looked up momentarily, returned his eyes to the baby, who was trying to locate a nipple on his arm.

  ‘I … I have been thinking about it,’ he said.

  ‘Would you like to name her after your mother?’

  ‘I was thinking … Do you like the name Lyubov?’

  ‘Lyubov,’ she repeated, testing the syllables.

  ‘I thought Lyubov … Love … Love is a good name for a girl, isn’t it?’

  September 1881

  Konstantin sang to the rhythm of his oars: a cheerful tune of his own invention, which drove all thoughts out of his mind. Around him, a skittish breeze chased among the willows on the banks of the Protva, exposing the pale undersides of their yellow-green leaves. In the fields, the peasants were threshing the rye as they had threshed the rye for centuries – their flails falling in mechanical sequence. They were half a kilometre beyond the meander when Varya turned her eyes towards the high, bright clouds and Konstantin lifted the blades, felt the little wave subside around his feet. After four weeks lying in the summer air, his long, curved boat had shrunk in places, but it remained as fleet, as stable as ever, and Varya steered them easily past the tip of the peninsula, between the broad, dry beaches, the colouring alders and the walls of brambles – their silver wake dwindling as they came to a halt not a metre from the bank.

  This late in the season, the algae had fallen and the eddy was motionless, clear as a spring. As Varya arranged the baby on her breast beneath her shawl, Konstantin collected the bowl that they used as a bail. He leant on the gunwale and looked past the inverted trees, the reflections of his hat and his spectacles, at the patterns of the riverbed, the thin weeds straggling towards the surface. He took a scoop of water from the boat and threw it over the prow. He threw another. And another.

  ‘Hey!’ called Varya.

  Konstantin looked up to see his wife reaching for the brambles, her face translucent from her weeks of confinement. On her lap, where Lyuba sent tremors across the linen swaddling as she had lately sent tremors across the taut white skin of her mother’s belly, there lay a pile of blackberries.

  He returned to the gunwale to see the river plants passing at some infinitesimal velocity, contorting with minute ripples.

  Again he scooped up water, but this time he hurled it as hard as he could.

  ‘Hey!’ Varya repeated.

  Trembling with excitement, Konstantin threw the bail. He grabbed an oar and launched it towards the shoulder of the peninsula. He threw the second oar. He threw his seat. He shed his hat, his jacket, his spectacles and his ear trumpet into the bottom of the boat, climbed on to the prow and stood there, teetering, a foot on either gunwale while the brambles slid steadily past him.

  ‘Kostya!’

  As he dived, Konstantin felt the boat thrust away from him. He felt the freezing river meet his outstretched hands, part around his face, consume the length of his full, clothed body. He felt the bubbles boiling back towards the air, the fibrous weeds between his fingers, and when he opened his eyes he saw a team of tench flicker and vanish, a sudden squall of sunlight slice through the water, igniting the confusion on the bottom of the river as he cupped his hands and kicked out his legs like a frog.

  October 1881

  The flame of the candle shivered as Konstantin turned the page of his exercise book – the light repeated in the mirror on his desk, in the two, moss-caulked windows, in the coarse salt crystals dissolving slowly between them. There were no streetlamps in Borovsk. The shutters of the mole-eyed houses on Kaluzhskaya Street were closed, and beyond the glass the stars flared in the bare black sky, bright as miniature Suns. He began the next page impatiently, scrawling sentences even he could scarcely decipher, tucking notes into the margin, doodling, as he paused to think, a steam locomotive with a pair of carriages, a little Earth beneath them and a line of dots extending into space: a cosmic railway where, a moment later, he allowed the train to continue its journey at 11.17 kilometres per second – the smoke pouring aimlessly from its funnel.

  Between the globe and the water bottle, Lyuba was squawking discernibly, wriggling so that her small, bowed legs went one way and her shoulders went the other. Konstantin took his compass from the drawer and drew a circle on the page. Across its middle he drew a dotted ellipse to suggest the spacecraft’s sphericality, while at one end of the meridional axis he drew a cylinder with a ball in its open mouth. He reached for his knife and sharpened his pencil, but then his daughter kicked a tiny foot into the chill air of the bedroom and so he leant over the basket and tucked her blankets back beneath the sheepskin.

  ‘Lyuba …’ he sighed. ‘Now, little girl, you keep calm now. Your mother’s just gone to have a rest. She will be back with your dinner very, very soon.’

  Konstantin drew a second cylinder intruding from the opposite wall of the spacecraft, which he turned into a cannon with an arsenal of cannonballs. On the polar and equatorial axes, he drew a pair of axles with a broad black disc at either end.

  ‘Little girl …’ he repeated.

  Beneath her woollen hat, the baby’s face had coloured almost violet. She was wriggling madly, her eyes sealed, her mouth open so that he could see her naked gums, her sharp little tongue. Distantly, he could hear her cry – a furious note, piercing his concentration – and, after a moment, he set down his pencil and gathered her in his arms. He held her to his chest, rolling forwards and backwards, murmuring some half-remembered lullaby until he felt her fierce, convulsive movements relax and finally stop.

  When he looked again, her face had recovered its usual pink. She was watching him with round blue eyes, which seemed to express extreme surprise.

  ‘Lyuba …’ He lay her on his left arm, her head inside his elbow. ‘Look … If I talk to you, will you keep calm? Please? What if I tell you a secret? How about that?’ He waited, took her silence for assent. ‘Very well. The secret is, you must be the cannon! There! What do you think of that? You see, when a cannon fires the ball goes one way and the cannon goes the other, but everybody always thinks about the ball. The fact is, when there is nothing to push against – no air, no ground, no water – then reaction is the only principle that will help you. If you want to travel in empty space, you have to eject some part of your mass. You have to fire a cannon, or a rocket, or open a barrel of compressed gas …’

  Konstantin looked down at his daughter, who continued to watch him with wide-eyed attention – although he had barely stopped talking before he felt her beginning to stir, and so he held up his exercise book so that she would be able to see the picture.

  ‘Very well …’ he said, patiently. ‘So, what we need is a vehicle that follows this principle. Right? The first thing to consider is that we will be travelling in a perfect void, and we will still need to breathe, so we require a craft able to withstand the pressure of an atmosphere like the atmosphere we’re accustomed to here on Earth – that is, about 100 kilogrammes per square decimetre. Of course, the strongest shape is a sphere, so our craft will be spherical with a number of thick, hermetically sealed windows, allowing us to see in every direction.

  ‘Like any other body, our craft has three mutually perpendicular axes. We will call them polar, meridional and equatorial. Now. Imagine for a moment that I am floating free in space and I remove my hat and spin
it directly above me, around my polar axis. What happens? Well, I spin in the opposite direction, don’t I? I spin at an angular velocity proportionate to our relative masses. And if I spin the hat around one of my transverse axes, then I will perform either a somersault or a cartwheel. So, what if our craft has a pair of wheels, which coincide precisely with the polar and equatorial axes? Well, exactly the same principle will apply! If I spin a wheel in one direction, I will revolve the craft in the opposite direction, and if I spin both wheels in the right combination I can revolve the craft to face in any direction I choose – with no loss of matter whatsoever! The only problem is, no matter how fast I spin my wheels still there will be no movement of the craft’s free centre. That is to say, we will simply be revolving around the same spot. But …’ He opened his eyes to echo the baby’s expression. ‘We have still got one remaining axis, haven’t we? What happens if I place a reaction device at either end of the meridional axis?

  ‘You see?’ Konstantin pointed to his pair of cylinders. ‘Here we have two different devices. On the right, we have a regular cannon. On the left, we have a device very like a cannon, but with a single ball attached to a very long string so that the mass is not lost. It allows us to perform journeys over a limited area. Of course, each of these devices allows us to travel in one direction only, but if I turn the wheels on the polar and equatorial axes then I can revolve the craft to face any direction I like! I can take a sight on a star – Aldebaran, for example – and once we are correctly orientated I can fire the cannon and we will travel at a constant velocity in exactly that direction, unless I turn the craft and fire the cannon again! And we can travel exactly as fast as we want! This is the wonder of it! We can fire again and again, and each time we will accelerate, but at a rate entirely tolerable by the human organism!’

  Once again, he looked at his daughter, whose face had softened during her six weeks of independent existence, become smooth and precise. Thick, dark hair protruded from her hat. She had extracted an arm from her patchwork blanket and was reaching for his beard with tiny, pink-nailed fingers.