Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  The widow met him in her dressing gown. She insisted on cooking a full breakfast. She was worried about his weight loss; she knew the reason for it, but she feared for his health. He surrendered. He ate the heavy breakfast of sausage and bacon. Later he vomited it up.

  That morning the cosmonauts were advised of a restructuring of the training groups. November 7, 1967 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution — had passed, Korolev’s deadline for a pair of Soviet cosmonauts to orbit the Moon. The program was paralyzed by his death and its vehicles were grounded following the loss of Komarov. But the Americans weren’t flying either. At the start of the year, a fire during ground testing of the Apollo 1 Command Module had killed Gus Grissom and his crew, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, necessitating a lengthy technical review of the Apollo spacecraft.

  Korolev’s successor as Chief Designer had been his deputy, Vasily Mishin. In the time since his appointment, the corps had learned that he preferred the spacecraft to be automated and a cosmonaut to take control only in the event of a catastrophic systems failure. Engineers had been selected to become cosmonauts. Medical criteria had been relaxed to admit them. Korolev had had his favorites too — Gagarin, of course, and Leonov — and Yefgenii had sensed he might have come to be held in the same regard. While Korolev had placed his trust in the daring of fighter pilots, Mishin was more impressed by technical expertise. Engineers with little training had replaced experienced cosmonauts in mission selection, and then in just as precipitate a fashion this decision had been reversed by the Space Committee. Training groups were formed, restructured and reformed depending on who was favored, pilot or engineer. That morning, it was announced the cosmonauts were required to sit for an examination.

  Yefgenii cleared his mind of all distractions and concentrated on pushing himself through the pain. When the test came, he scored highest. He understood the technical particulars of the spacecraft as well as any engineer; his mathematical ability cruised him through orbital mechanics. The corps was divided in two, one group assigned in three-man crews to the Soyuz vehicle and rendezvous-docking operations in Earth orbit, and the other assigned in pairs to fly the two-man Zond spacecraft to the Moon.

  Mishin didn’t give Yefgenii a slot. He favored an engineer.

  Gevorkian called at the new apartment block that had opened the previous summer. Yefgenii swam in the pool whose construction had been overseen by Gagarin himself. In this first summer without him, the summer of 1968, the N-1 booster rocket was behind schedule, the LK lunar lander was still on the drawing board, they were launching unmanned missions in automated Zonds but no men from the USSR were flying to the Moon.

  Yefgenii Yeremin felt it in the thickness of the water, how they’d fallen behind for the first time. His thin limbs were heavy, they didn’t scissor through. He rolled from front crawl onto his back. A film of water flowed across his face and, when it cleared, the face of Arman Gevorkian was peering at him from the poolside.

  “Comrade Mishin’s approved the backup assignments at last.”

  Yefgenii continued to backstroke. His long arms turned in slow arcs, water falling from them in fine curtains.

  “The backup lunar pairings have been agreed. I’ve been selected as a flight engineer.”

  “An engineer. Of course. Congratulations.” Yefgenii reached the end of the pool, turned and switched to front crawl.

  “The crews have to be weight balanced, the heavier men paired with the lighter—” Gevorkian scampered along the poolside to keep up, but Yefgenii ducked his head under the water.

  When Yefgenii reached the shallow end, Gevorkian was waiting. “Please fuck off.”

  “I asked for you. He said yes. You’re the pilot.”

  Yefgenii stood. Water streamed off his bald head, off his shoulders and chest. His long lean body glistened. A smile burst like the Sun.

  They trained in the centrifuge at CTC, the biggest in the world. They practiced carrying out reentry procedures while being subjected to 9, 10, 11 g. They travelled to the planetarium in Moscow and spent hours learning the constellations. To learn the stars of the southern hemisphere, they flew to Somalia. They ventured into the desert where under a clear black sky they pointed sextants into the heavens. The Moon hung overhead. It no longer lay beyond reach.

  In September an unmanned Zond travelled to the Moon and back with a pair of tortoises on board. Gevorkian said, “Of course Mishin chose tortoises — he is one,” because, despite the success and a subsequent rendezvous of Soyuz capsules in Earth orbit, they were still focusing on reentry problems.

  By now the lunar crews were in place. The manned Zond, the L-1, would be flown first by Leonov and Makarov, then Bykofsky

  and Rukavishnikov, then Popovich and Sevastyanov, all partnerships of command pilots and flight engineers, with Yeremin and Gevorkian as one of the backup crews: three missions would loop round the Moon and return to Earth, and then one crew would be selected to return in the L-3 spacecraft and attempt a landing.

  It was Wally Schirra who led America’s first Apollo flight, an orbital test of their Command Module. Then came reports the Americans had modified Apollo. Fearing a Soviet circumlunar flight and suffering delays with their Lunar Module, they moved up their first circumlunar attempt and began mounting a manned flight to the Moon using only the Command Module of the Apollo spacecraft. Meanwhile yet another Zond was launched, again unmanned, again it experienced minor reentry problems, again the men who were ready to voyage to the Moon were ordered to stand down.

  Frustration and resentment rippled through the cosmonaut corps. These men wanted to fly. They accepted the risk. Yefgenii as much as any man understood that. When the eyes of the cosmonauts met, they shared the look of men whose days were burning by. Battling the Americans had become introspective and claustrophobic. The open sky had shrunk down to the intense compartments of a capsule simulator or a centrifuge, of aircraft cabins and water tanks.

  Yefgenii Yeremin continued to train. His back ached from a wearying day in the simulator. He concentrated on the tiniest movements of his hands, on the position of switches; he shifted in a hard little seat inside a cramped metal box. His limbs were hard rods; his torso was narrow and bony. Every hour he craved a heavy meal. When the pangs of hunger became too intense, he’d binge and vomit.

  He knew a way onto the roof of the apartment block. The world expanded around him. City lights swamped the lower portions of the sky but the stars above shone in patterns that for the first time in his life he could recognize and name. A cosmonaut wasn’t a true cosmonaut till he flew in space. The single act transformed him from the human to the celestial. Portraits of Gagarin hung everywhere, more than when he’d lived; a new street, a new building was named in his honour almost every week. His life and his act were part of history, they lived in the narrative of the species. Tomorrow would be another day of training, another day in the box.

  With Gevorkian he was carrying out a launch-abort drill when Ges came to them with the news they’d expected for weeks, and with each passing day had dreaded more. “Apollo 8 is on its way to the Moon.”

  State television ignored the flight. Newspapers reported it in a short column on the inside pages, if at all. The cosmonauts viewed the coverage at the Army’s Space Transmissions Corps building on Komsomolsky Avenue. In the dark theater, the men exchanged bitter whispers. It should’ve been two of us. If Sergei Pavlovich were still here, it would’ve been us, we’d’ve been first.

  Of course, they’d known the Americans were test-flying the rocket they called the Saturn-5. They’d known they were using it to propel their Apollo Command and Service Module and the three men aboard farther from Earth than any human being had ever travelled; but they’d hoped for some glitch, some technical problem with the Saturn-V, and for the mission to be aborted.

  Apollo 8 was sending back pictures from a mere 100 kilometres above the surface. The American astronauts were describing the colours of the terrain. They likened it to a beach.<
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  The next morning, December 25, 1968, Yefgenii returned to Komsomolsky Avenue before dawn. Snow fell on Moscow, dusting the streets and decorating the rooftops like white tinsel. A pale winter Moon hung in its first quarter. In a burst of emotion it struck him: three Americans were up there. They’d sailed across the Far Side, gazed down where no human eye had looked before and seen the earthrise.

  He wept. Gevorkian had called him a legend but the old legends were dead. This was a new one, and bigger than any in history: not just Ivan the Terrible, but all of them, the equal of Gagarin: Borman, Lovell and Anders were circling the Moon, reciting verses from the Book of Genesis, and, in America, it was Christmas Eve.

  NO WATER RAN HERE, none fell. The Baikonur Cosmodrome stood on a remote desert plain more than 2,000 kilometres from the nearest open sea, and only in winter when the snows came did the land reveal itself to be on Earth and not some other celestial body. When fronts passed through, wind boosted sand off the desert. It got into everything, through the cracks in the windows and doors. Yefgenii felt fine grit rolling across his eyes and round his teeth, felt it scratching his skin.

  In February, the cosmonaut corps was summoned to observe the maiden test flight of the N-1 rocket. A bus conveyed them from their accommodation to Pad 110, where they trooped out to gaze up at the gigantic metal candle. Early in the day its nose had pricked the cloudbase. Now the air was clear.

  Yefgenii knew nearly every detail of its operation. On a forthcoming flight it would propel the two-man L-3 spacecraft to the Moon and return part of it to the Earth. The L-3 was heavier than the Zond because it comprised a lunar orbiting vehicle and separate lunar lander. The N-1 was the most powerful rocket ever created. At that moment, Yefgenii would’ve climbed to the top of the great metal pillar and ridden it into the depths of space. He saw the same hungry look in the others’ eyes. They were sick of the rehearsal and wanted the performance. They wanted to be first.

  The bus scooted them to an observation platform. The cosmonauts stood in rows, with binoculars. When the countdown reached zero, thirty engines lit. First the fires flashed on, then, seconds later, thunder shook the ground. The rocket separated from the Earth with a slow ascent up the gantry, then gained speed, soon streaking in a high arc out over the desert.

  Then the fires went out. Yefgenii’s eyes strained through his binoculars. The rocket had disappeared. Seconds later an inferno blazed far away in the desert, the Moon above bit by bit masked by a thickening plume of smoke.

  The cosmonauts and engineers dispersed into small groups, men who trusted each other. Some were philosophical. It had been a maiden flight. Things go wrong.

  Gevorkian’s mood was more despondent. He knew more about the engineering of the rockets than any of them. “We don’t have the Americans’ money, their industry. They’re ahead, their vehicles are more advanced.”

  Yefgenii said, “The Americans spent millions of dollars designing a pen that could work in space. What did we do?” Gevorkian’s head was down, his eyes were down. “What did we do?”

  Gevorkian lifted his head. “We used pencils.”

  “We used pencils.”

  THEY TRAINED for the lunar landing in a modified Mi-4. Yefgenii had never flown a helicopter before he entered the cosmonaut program. He soon became adept.

  He sat at the top of the craft, under the rotor. The blades levitated storms of sand off the desert floor. The helicopter tipped up into the air, out of the sand, and soared into a blue sky patched by heaped white clouds. It was spring at Baikonur. The desert was dry, the air was hot.

  As he climbed, he saw the towering slabs of concrete that housed the N-1 processing plant. They rose out of the center of the Cosmodrome while to either side spread rows of launchpads, and, beyond, barely visible from this part of the desert, the tracking stations and the railway line. Heat haze blurred the railway into a vague gray band.

  From ceiling he pitched the helicopter down and guided it toward the training grounds. In principle he was simulating a descent from lunar orbit to a precise initiation point over a potential landing site. The landing would be carried out by the pilot, flying solo in the LK, while the flight engineer orbited the Moon in the stack containing the principal living compartment, the reentry capsule and the main engines of the L-3, all together known as the LOK.

  He hovered at just over 100 metres above the training grounds. Markings simulated craters, ridges and boulders. He selected a clear zone and then shut down the engine. The Mi-4 dropped at once, its rotors turning in the rush of air. Yefgenii pitched and yawed the craft, dead-sticking down toward the landing site. He made a soft touchdown on the exact spot he’d nominated.

  His performance was scored. He restarted the engine and recovered to the start point to repeat the exercise. He was one of six men training for the lunar landing. His scores ranked number one.

  Gevorkian worked on the development of the LK, the lunar lander, but already the American Apollo 9 mission was conducting tests of their own Lunar Module in Earth orbit. Then, in May, Apollo 10 travelled to the Moon. The Americans undocked their Lunar Module in orbit, descended to within 50,000 feet of the surface to reconnoiter landing sites, ascended for rendezvous with their Command Module, and made a successful return to Earth. Yefgenii knew next time would be the landing attempt: Apollo 11 was scheduled to launch in July.

  Desert preparations continued nonetheless. Sun scorched the sand. Air simmered in the throat. The cosmonauts and technicians suffered during the day and the heat wouldn’t let them sleep at night. Scorpions could prevail here, but not men. Yefgenii and the other command pilots of the lunar training group endured the conditions to simulate a descent to the surface of the Moon, but no manned flight was scheduled, only another test of the N-1 sometime that summer.

  The fate of these men appeared to be the fate of their nation, to scrabble around in the dust. The mission Yefgenii craved grew no closer.

  Gevorkian arrived to address the lunar training group on the subject of the N-1 program. He was one of them now, while still serving as a principal engineer in the project. In the lecture room the blinds hung down. Sunlight daggered through in hot sharp beams that projected a grid on the floor and walls. The windows were open but the air was still, stifling; Gevorkian had to raise his voice to be heard over the whirring fans.

  “We’ve diagnosed the problem with the N-1. As you know, its engines are arranged in two concentric circles. When they thrust, a hypobaric zone is created between the two circles which causes instability in flight.”

  “Can it be fixed?” Leonov asked.

  “We’re going to realign the engines. The vehicle will then require another unmanned test.”

  The cosmonauts knew this would be the procedure, but they shifted in their chairs. Their faces shone with sweat. Their shirts were moist. They sat like schoolchildren in a classroom, their days evaporating like the days of childhood.

  “And the LK?” Leonov asked him.

  “Once the launch vehicle has been flight-tested, I’m hopeful we will be able to conduct an Earth-orbit test of the LK before the end of the year.”

  “But is it ready?” Yefgenii asked.

  “The computer systems are proving problematic. You must understand, to recognize and interpret the datum marks required for a landing on another planet demands an exceptional piece of kit.”

  “We’ve got the kit,” Yefgenii said. “There’s six of them looking right back at you.”

  YEFGENII WAITED for his friend on a patch of ground near the engineering outbuildings. The Sun was slipping down behind the launchpad scaffolds that ran in a line west of the enormous rocket-processing plants, but the heat remained, cradled by the desert.

  Gevorkian appeared from the building and strode across the sand to him. “You were disrespectful to me as your project manager, as your comrade cosmonaut, and as your friend.”

  “I’d prefer that you were interested in hearing the idea behind by my comment.”

  “I und
erstood your remark. The human brain is the most sophisticated computer at our disposal. Men can be trained to navigate by the stars, we can be trained to calculate orbital mechanics—”

  “So let’s train a crew, and launch them.”

  “The rocket isn’t ready, the lander isn’t ready.”

  “That’s not what you said. You said they were.”

  “We can’t kill a crew finding out. The equipment must be tested.”

  “Then let the Americans win.” Yefgenii turned to walk away.

  “That’s what we’re already saying,” Gevorkian said.

  Yefgenii halted.

  “Officially the authorities are claiming there never was a race. Already Mishin is talking about Salyut. He says a landing on the Moon is a scientific and military non sequitur. Why go there without a plan to establish a Moon base? The next logical step is to establish a space station — to explore the Moon and planets only after that.”

  “There’s a race,” Yefgenii said. “I still want us to win it.”

  “So do I, my friend. I know the cosmonauts are ready, but Mishin doesn’t dare lose another man in space after Komarov—”

  “That’s why they chose us, isn’t it? To fly, or die trying?”

  Gevorkian sighed. “Every man thinks the same. We all want to lobby the authorities for a circumlunar flight.”

  “No. The Americans have already done it. Now only the landing matters.”

  “The N-1, the L-3, the LK — each would have to work perfectly on its maiden flight.”

  “They have to work sometime.”

  “Without fully automated systems.”

  “The crew will fly manually.”

  Gevorkian measured a pause. “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Realigning the engines of the N-1 will affect its thrust. We have to lose weight from the payload.”

  “How much weight?”

  “A lot. Maybe seventy kilos.”