Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  This time one man travelled to Graham Bell. “My name is Doktor Arman Gevorkian. I come from OKB-1. We’re looking for pilots who are prepared to test some new military hardware. This matter is of the utmost secrecy.”

  By now the commanding officer was called Pokryshev. Four had come and gone since Kostilev had completed his tour and progressed to a comfortable administrative post somewhere on the mainland. Pokryshev gave a respectful nod. “Of course, Doktor Gevorkian.”

  “I’ve come in connection with one pilot in particular — Kapetan Yefgenii Yeremin. Would he agree to fly with me today?”

  Pokryshev’s cheek muscles twitched. “Someone would have to ask him.”

  “Is there a problem, polkovnik? I come on the highest authority.”

  “Of course, Doktor Gevorkian. I meant no offense. Please forgive me.”

  Yefgenii received orders to report to the flight clothing unit. An official from Moscow wanted to interview him.

  When he arrived he thought from behind he recognized the man with Pokryshev. His pace quickened toward the diminutive figure looking ill at ease in a life jacket and immersion suit. The man turned and Yefgenii saw that his complexion was olive, his nose was beaky and his thick black eyebrows met in the middle. Yefgenii felt foolish. How could it have been Gnido? Gnido was long dead, so long dead.

  Pokryshev made the introductions and then made an awkward departure. Gevorkian looked up at Yefgenii. He’d never seen a picture of him, had no idea what to expect. He hadn’t anticipated someone who looked so sad. That was Yefgenii now, still tall, but gaunt, the white-blond hair all but gone.

  The two men stood in the open, in the grayness between an 8 a.m. dawn and 10 a.m. dusk. A freezing wind gusted off the pack ice, carrying showers of hard white flakes. Gevorkian said, “OKB-1 is looking for volunteers.”

  MiGs were roaring off the runway a kilometre away; the wind was bringing the sound right to them.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘we’re looking for volunteers.’ First-class fighter pilots under thirty-five years of age in excellent physical condition.”

  “To do what?”

  “We call them ‘cosmonauts.’”

  Yefgenii smiled. Gevorkian was surprised to see him smile. He hadn’t expected it.

  “Who told you I was here?”

  “What?”

  “Who told you about me?”

  “Your victory over the U-2 was not without admirers, even in the highest places.”

  Yefgenii studied Gevorkian. This was a chance, after all these years, and to question his potential deliverer’s motive would be foolish in the extreme.

  Gevorkian read the look on Yefgenii’s face. “It was Comrade Ges.”

  Yefgenii nodded. The flying flakes of ice bit into the side of his face.

  “He told me about the U-2. Or, rather, he told our Chief Designer. You scored the victory and you saved his life.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “He said you were the best pilot this country’s ever produced and they were keeping you in a glass case, with a sign that says Break open only in time of national crisis.”

  Yefgenii laughed. “Ges is a cosmonaut now?”

  “Yes, Kapetan, he is one of our leading trainees.”

  “Trainee for what?”

  “The Space Committee has finally issued a directive that we must endeavor to send a man to the Moon. We must beat the Americans.”

  Another MiG accelerated down the runway. The scream of its jet crescendoed and then Yefgenii said, “Sounds like my kind of thing.”

  Gevorkian saw how excited he looked. He hesitated. “Though, perhaps, with your application, we should be cautious…”

  Yefgenii felt an ache of hunger. He couldn’t disguise it. He’d thought someone in authority had decided he’d served out his exile, at long last. That’s what he’d thought.

  The wind shook the loose flaps of Yefgenii’s clothing. It drove into him, through him. Even after all these years he wasn’t used to it.

  He said, “I was told you wanted to fly.”

  “That’s right, Kapetan.”

  “So let’s fly.”

  They climbed to the south, over the bobbing ice floes of the Barents Sea, in a modified MiG trainer equipped with two seats and dual controls. The intercom loop was permanently open and the sounds of Gevorkian in the seat behind disconcerted Yefgenii. He could hear him breathing, he could hear every sniff and slurp.

  “Do you believe you’ll be successful in sending a man to the Moon?”

  “We intend to spread Communism to our closest celestial neighbor. All will go well for the first five years, then there’ll be a shortage of moondust.” Gevorkian laughed.

  Yefgenii opened the throttle all the way and pitched back into the climbing attitude. The white ocean dropped behind them. The stubby white needle of the altimeter began to count up through the thousands. Sheets of cirrus plunged toward them and through and began to sink to earth. The air thinned, the sky darkened, and the world began to curve into a lens. They were topping 15,000 metres, nearing 16,000. A glistening cap of white curved over the top of the planet. The sky was bigger than countries and taller.

  The climb shallowed. Even at full throttle the long narrow needle was barely adding on any more height. Yefgenii began a turn. The controls were sluggish. The aircraft was at its ceiling: too much bank and she’d stall and spin all the way down.

  Over the ice cap floated a half moon. She was inchoate, she was a blur, a cataract. She seemed to lie just outside the glass of the canopy, hardly beyond their fingertips, but she was already slipping over the top of the world.

  Yefgenii eased the aircraft’s nose down into a dive. “What’s OKB-1?”

  The MiG gathered pace. Air roared over the canopy. Gevorkian had to shout. “The rocketry design bureau!” The wings shook till they broke through Mach 1, then they plunged straight down. The needle of the Mach meter continued to creep across the dial. Gevorkian knew they were approaching the MiG’s theoretical maximum speed. He clasped his hands hard across his lap. “I like to call my position ‘Head of Novel Thinking’!”

  Yefgenii throttled back and coaxed the MiG’s nose out of the dive. “Why d’you call it that?”

  “There’s something I discuss with the Chief Designer… I’d describe it as my grand enterprise. It involves the attainment of extreme altitude.”

  “How high?”

  “The stars.” Gevorkian waited. He could hear the sound of Yefgenii breathing in the seat in front but nothing else. “You’re not laughing, Kapetan? Normally they laugh.”

  “No. I’m not laughing.”

  Yefgenii levelled off. The pale ocean swung under the nose and then from beneath the fuselage emerged the distant harbor of Murmansk.

  “Kapetan Yeremin, I urge you not to despair. The Chief Designer is an admirer of your achievements. He has the ear of those in authority, and they’re of a mind to listen.”

  Yefgenii gazed out across the sea toward land. It was time to turn back for the runways of Franz Josef Land but he held the MiG in its aimless trajectory.

  Gevorkian said, “All my life I’ve loved airplanes. I’ve loved everything about them. Your name was not unknown to me when mentioned by Comrade Ges. I heard the stories that came back from Korea. What can I say, Kapetan? Your exploits inspired me.” Gevorkian felt embarrassed so he continued without a pause. “A faceless apparatchik decided you should wither away in exile; I am not faceless. I can exhort the authorities to reconsider. In the space program, you would not be first in line. That would be a different kind of man, a spotless man, a flawless man — but one day in the future there might be a part for you to play, if you were prepared to wait…”

  A submarine was surfacing on its return to Murmansk. It churned the waters into a long white wake. The Northern Fleet carried weapons that could destroy the world. The nuclear exchange would be measured in hours. Navies would rust. Air forces would vaporize. Cities would crumbl
e. The ocean swallowed the submarine’s wake as it did the wake of every single vessel that passed. Man might obliterate himself from the earth, but the sea would still roll on for a million years or more.

  Yefgenii gazed down into the water. Ice floes drifted like tombstones.

  “I would wait,” he said.

  Star City and Baikonur

  1966–1969

  LIFE WAS GOOD NOW, in comparison. Star City lay on the outskirts of Moscow. There they lived in a smart block of system-built flats with other cosmonaut families. Their home was warm, light and modern. They owned a television set. The widow didn’t have to queue for food or clothing; the shops were well stocked. Their larder bulged.

  Ges and his wife lived across the hall. The women shopped together. The children attended the local school. They skipped off each morning hand in hand with Yuri Gagarin’s children, or Alexei Leonov’s.

  At last his family had respite from the years of cold and exile, but for Cosmonaut Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin the situation was less comfortable. Though he didn’t confess his insecurity, he’d joined an elite group, some of whom had already flown in space and many of whom had been in training for five years or more. His size was a handicap; by some criteria he exceeded the limits laid down for selection, and his eligibility to fly existing and future spacecraft would be evaluated mission by mission. Yet the Chief Designer himself had pressed for his selection, though it was processed in secret; the authorities gave way but had insisted his name could not appear in any official record, so he was obliged to enter under a pseudonym.

  He was introduced to the nation’s leading pilots, the leading pilots of the culture. Here was Gagarin, here was Komarov, here was Leonov. Almost without exception the Americans chose seasoned test pilots as their astronauts, but in the main the cosmonauts were fighter pilots like him, men who’d made some kind of mark in military aviation; some believed they’d been selected on the strength of a single instance of daring or proficiency. One act could define a man in the eyes of his peers, in the eyes of his nation.

  His fellow cosmonauts read the false name on his flight suit. They shook his hand and met his eyes. The use of the pseudonym was a charade — of course they knew who he was. Every man recognized his achievements as a combat pilot, but Korea wasn’t just part of the past. For all the lives lost, the war had achieved nothing for the great powers, so it was to be disregarded as a matter of policy. The first war of the nuclear age, the first of the jet age, the unique military confrontation between the new great powers that ruled the planet, had been forgotten in the space of little more than a decade, while Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin orbited the Earth with Project Gemini. They’d become the giants, not McConnell, not Jabara; they were giants as Ali was a giant, as Pelé, as Laver and Nicklaus were.

  Yefgenii underwent intensive preparations at the Cosmonaut Training Center. The physical challenges were tougher than those given to fighter pilots. Now he was a man in his thirties. The stresses hurt him. They stretched his stamina. He needed to adapt to new techniques and learn the engineering of vehicles different from any form of aircraft he’d ever flown.

  He adapted. He was a quiet man who listened to instructions. He studied each operation in detail. He analyzed how he could make a technique more efficient or more precise for himself. The technicians noted his improvements. In the simulators, his decisions were quick and accurate. He was always calm, always austere and remote, but this was the hardest work of his life, the steepest hill yet. He dared not show a splinter of strain.

  The cramped seats and capsules were designed within payload weight limits. Every gram was crucial. He was nearly a foot taller than Gagarin and his height caused him endless pain, in his knees, in his shoulders and worst of all in his back, but his weight was the greater trouble, because it might exclude him from a mission. He began to refuse the widow’s meals, with the excuse that he had to work or that some training exercises were best carried out on an empty stomach. He was becoming like a jockey, light for his height, lean and hard, always hungry.

  He made parachute jumps. The pain shot from the base of his spine down his legs but, minutes later, despite a residual ache, he took on the next piece of suffering. He couldn’t tell anyone, couldn’t ever show, or that would be the end of him.

  While the widow put the children to bed, he studied technical manuals. After what supper he might or might not have eaten, he would return to them; hours later, she’d declare she was going to bed, but he’d carry on, into the night, reading fine print till his vision blurred, his stomach aching with hunger.

  It reminded him of the orphanage, of the mathematics that had launched his trajectory. That drive he’d found in himself, what he was capable of, this was something he had to find again. The sky above was black, but not with the oppressive clouds of a city in ruins; this was the blank open canvas on which a man could blaze like a comet.

  Gevorkian informed Yefgenii they were throwing a New Year’s party at OKB-1. Only a handful of cosmonauts were invited, but he was to be one of them, at the personal request of the Chief Designer.

  Hundreds of people filled a vast hall decorated with balloons. Outside, fireworks banged and blazed in the night. Ges led him to the buffet table. Champagne bottles stood in rows behind a glinting array of flutes. Ges chatted with fellow trainees while Yefgenii drank straight away to settle his nerves.

  He observed the Chief Designer near the band, laughing with Gagarin and Leonov. Then a woman in a ball gown asked him to dance. The Chief Designer obliged and they spun off across the dance floor. The women were elegant and admiring. For the cosmonaut corps, there were always such women.

  Komarov joined Gagarin and Leonov. He was a grave older man, a senior test pilot, the command pilot of Voskhod 1, which had carried the first three-man crew. These men had missions behind them. They were a breed apart from those who’d trained for space but had never flown. They glowed. They were themselves celestial objects.

  Gevorkian approached Yefgenii, poured himself a glass of champagne. He studied the nervousness in Yefgenii’s expression. “I’m just a genius,” Gevorkian said. “You’re a legend.”

  Gevorkian led Yefgenii across the divide to Gagarin. Gagarin greeted them with a broad handsome grin, this celestial man as great as his nation. He was the most powerful living symbol of Soviet achievement, the most famous pilot in history. His name would live longer than countries.

  They toasted the New Year. Gagarin ate canapés. Like the small men, he never worried about his weight; physical exercise would keep him trim. Yefgenii watched the tasty morsels of food passing Gagarin’s lips. He declined them, suffering hunger pangs.

  The Chief Designer returned. Now a cosmonaut, Yefgenii was permitted to know his name. “S.P….” said Gevorkian.

  Sergei Pavlovich Korolev disregarded Yefgenii’s pseudonym. “Kapetan Yeremin,” he said. “How are you finding our enterprise so far?”

  “It’s my honour to participate, thank you, Sergei Pavlovich.”

  “Now you’ve joined us, I have the team to beat the Americans.” He threw an arm round Yefgenii’s shoulders. Yefgenii was taken by surprise. He felt awkward at the physical closeness. He worried the Chief Designer was drunk.

  Korolev continued, “I’ve dedicated my intellectual life to achieving firsts. The first satellite, the first probe to the Moon, the first man in space, the first woman, the first three-man crew, the first EVA. You beat the Americans all those times in Korea, Ivan the Terrible. You beat their U-2. Now you’ll help us beat them to the Moon.”

  He beckoned Gagarin, Leonov and Komarov. His gestures were flamboyant. He was a leader, and more, he was a magician. The three cosmonauts joined in. Korolev hugged them as he’d hugged Yefgenii, kissed their foreheads. Yefgenii saw he wasn’t drunk. He was brimming with life and ambition. “Come the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution,” he said, “two of you will be orbiting the Moon.”

  Korolev raised his glass again,
and so did the cosmonauts. The magical Chief Designer had swept away Yefgenii’s doubts about the future and his own role in it. Yefgenii grinned and threw his glass in the air, as much a part of the enterprise as any other man.

  A few weeks later Korolev was dead. He’d gone into hospital for routine surgery and they’d found a tumor; he bled; his heart and lungs gave out on the operating table; then it was Komarov, piloting the first Soyuz, who became the first man to die during spaceflight when the parachutes failed after reentry; and a year later it was Gagarin, killed on a training flight when another aircraft near-collided with his MiG-15. If any man’s life had been synecdochic of his nation’s, it was his; Yuri Gagarin was the Russian DiMaggio. Even he could be taken, even he, the immortal.

  IN A RUSSIA WITHOUT GAGARIN, the air seemed colder, the skies emptier. Something had been lost that was impossible to define. A clock had ticked on the mantelpiece and the occupants of the room had remained oblivious till the second the ticking stopped.

  Yefgenii Yeremin rose before dawn. He drank milk to bloat his aching stomach. He ate eggs to feed his muscles. Outside the apartment building the streetlamps of Star City glowed yellow. They were lines pointing to infinity.

  He followed the column of trees to the end of the avenue and then increased his pace, beginning a familiar circuit of the city. His breaths blew clouds that hung in the air for an instant before vanishing. He glided past offices and laboratories. Barbed wire bounded the perimeter, beyond it thick woods. Sentries turned as they heard him coming. Their guns swung round then down-pointed. The guards saluted the cosmonaut as he ran past.

  Twinges began to prod his chest. His arms felt heavier. His back ached. This was the run home, the push, the pain.

  In the apartment he showered. He was quiet, so as not to wake the children. The hot water eased his back. He stretched taut sinewy muscles. He weighed himself. In the mirror his ribs showed, his belly caved in; his iliac crests protruded.