Ascent by Jed Mercurio

by Ascent (com v4. 0)

  Yefgenii said it. “A man,” he said.

  Gevorkian studied him. His eyes narrowed. “The workload’s too intense for one man. He’d have to carry out the lunar-orbit rendezvous alone. He might never make it back.”

  Yefgenii eyed him but declared nothing.

  Gevorkian said, “The objective is to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth. It wouldn’t count.”

  “It did for Gagarin.”

  Gevorkian looked around to ensure they couldn’t be overhead. One of the most sensitive of state secrets was that Gagarin hadn’t landed his capsule. He’d ejected during reentry at around 7,000 metres and parachuted down. By the rules of international aviation records, ejection made the attempt void. Gagarin’s flight shouldn’t have counted: Shepard was first. But to all the world Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space because he’d been first to get there, and how he’d returned, probably even if he hadn’t returned at all, didn’t matter.

  “And the same went for Laika,” Yefgenii said. His eyes were blue fire. “I’m not even here in my own name. If any man’s death could be hidden, I’m that man.”

  IN THE MORNING, he travelled to Star City on three days’ leave. By the time he arrived home the children had returned from school. The widow was serving them their tea. She made a sound of joy as she heard the door open; she ran across the apartment to greet him. He held her in his arms and kissed her. The children came down from the table and he hugged them both.

  That night in bed the widow said, “You’re not flying.”

  “Why do you say that?” he said.

  “They gave you leave. They don’t give leave to the men who are going into space.”

  He said nothing. She held him tighter. She was relieved that he hadn’t been selected for the next mission. He was a cosmonaut now. His career was made. The years of exile for him were over, the cold and misery for her and the children, now she was a cosmonaut’s wife. Their life would always be good, whether he risked his life in space or not, in the system-built city, in the system.

  “It’s my job,” he said.

  Next morning he slipped out for his run. The Sun was up, the air was mild. As he began his circuit of the city it occurred to him to run faster, to run faster and faster, till at the perimeter fence where the sentries saluted him he was in a headlong sprint, his blood rushing, great lungfuls of breath rasping through his throat. It had come to him to run faster because he’d decided not to run home, but to give everything to the outbound leg, and walk or crawl back, whatever his state was. How much faster he flew, not having to save anything for the run home.

  When he returned, the children were still dozing. The widow, in her dressing gown, beamed. She cooked breakfast for him. “You will eat, won’t you?” she said, but they were interrupted by the older child, the girl, calling for her father.

  Yefgenii crept into the children’s room. The girl’s hair lay across her face. She was curled in a ball, blankets heaped on top of her. He parted the hair from her eyes and kissed her forehead. She gave him a hug and he opened her curtain onto a bright clear summer day. The boy stirred. Yefgenii swept him over his shoulder and carried him, the girl holding his free hand, to the kitchen.

  After breakfast Yefgenii vomited in secret and then the family went to the playground built for the children of the cosmonauts and technicians. The girl rode her bicycle, the boy clambered across a climbing frame. Yefgenii watched the boy use his long limbs to swing from rail to rail.

  “Are you on holiday, daddy?” said the girl.

  She hooked her arms round his midriff and looked up at him. She was tall for her age, her head reaching his chest, and she was bony like he’d become. Her eyes were big, and coloured with his blue. He gazed down at her and pulled a joking face. She curled a lip; she was too old for this now. The boy ran across the concrete kicking a football. In the apartment or outdoors, the boy ran everywhere; he carried his father’s energy with him. He was getting big. He was getting into fights.

  The girl got frustrated when she didn’t get her way. She didn’t look much like him but she had his drive, his desire to win. The boy was milder. He had blond hair and blue eyes and Yefgenii couldn’t stop himself from scuffing his hair. He hugged them both. In his arms snuggled beautiful creatures made of soft pale flesh.

  That night Gevorkian called at the apartment. The widow offered him supper but he declined. He had operational matters to discuss with her husband. Yefgenii picked his coat off the hook and the men strolled out to the elevator. He read a look in Gevorkian’s face that had been there the moment the widow had opened the door to him. They went out into the dark tree-lined avenue and the look didn’t shift.

  “You’re to report to General Kamanin in the morning,” he said. “General Kamanin, the Chief Designer, and the senior members of the Space Committee. General Secretary Brezhnev has been briefed.”

  The mission was on. Yefgenii Yeremin was the one name unknown to the spies in the West who followed the program. He’d leapfrogged the prime crews of the lunar training group not so much because he was the most able but because he was the most expendable.

  “How will it work?” he said.

  “Technicians are working round the clock to ready the L-3 for the next N-1 test flight, scheduled for July third. If the flight isn’t successful, reports will proclaim the rocket exploded on the launchpad during an unmanned test.”

  Gevorkian paused. “The proposal will be put to you officially by General Kamanin. You will be given a free choice without fear of reprisals.” He kissed Yefgenii on the cheek. “Say no,” he said.

  Yefgenii lay awake throughout the night. The children would miss him, their mother would miss him. The boy and the girl carried his genes and the few behaviors instilled by his minimal parenting. In this regard they were no different from animals. Man’s unique superiority was that his life’s legacy could surpass the reproductive, he could create history, exceed his own life and biology, but this applied to very few. No matter how happy and pleasurable their existence, most men were reckoned in terms no better than animals: they consumed, excreted, reproduced, died and decayed. So far, this was the measure of his own life: biology not history. Still the great mission he’d craved had remained elusive, the one that would write his name in the sky and colour him celestial.

  As dawn came Yefgenii rose in silence. He sat at the edge of the bed, his eyes damp with tears. The widow stirred. She reached out. Her hand brushed his bare back, feeling the ridges of ribs and the hard plates of scapulae that had appeared in recent years not from privation but from single-minded discipline.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  He didn’t turn. His feet were planted on the floor, his back arched over, his head downturned. A breeze shifted the curtains. A yellow light played across his back and the profile of his head.

  “What is it?” she said again.

  This time he turned.

  “They’ve got a mission for me,” he said, and in his eyes she saw what the mission must be, and she knew here came their destiny; here it came like a train with them on the tracks.

  He passed through the rooms of the apartment, past the photographs of their life together, to the sleeping bodies of his children. He touched their heads, first the girl’s, then the boy’s, these strange and beautiful creatures. His tears fell. Ivan the Terrible was floating over their faces like a cloud passing over the face of the Moon. His form was becoming less solid. He was already becoming a ghost to them.

  The Earth and the Moon

  1969–

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE sails in a ship named Voskhodyeniye. His dark vessel drifts against brilliant colours. Clouds mass in enormous white bands. They glow. He’s dazzled by weather the size of continents. In places the sky is empty all the way down. Patches of green dapple brown lands, but most of what curves below shines in great pools of blue. Everything glows. The clouds and seas radiate reflected sunlight. The oceans burn like blue suns. The Sun itself, unfilt
ered by the atmosphere, is a disc of energy fuelling a half sky of unbearable brilliance, bright beyond any glare he’s ever endured on Earth, warming one side of the modified Soyuz; then the Sun drifts behind the world, snuffed out by the planet, so that night stretches below and darkness all around, leaving only the flickering lights of the largest cities and the steady points of starlight, and all these sights must cram into stolen glimpses because there’s so much work for him to do.

  The space inside is cramped. His space suit bulks him out. Only his head and hands are free, since on achieving orbit Mission Control cleared him to remove his bubble helmet and space gloves. He wears a leather communications helmet incorporating earpieces and a microphone. Checklists hang in the air, close-printed paper in plastic sleeves, at first glance motionless but over time sliding in a direction determined by the tiny momentum imparted when he places them. They are task enough for two men, let alone one. Yefgenii carries out the checks step by step. His fingers work the switches and circuit breakers of the SA. His eyes fixate on the switch markings as he checks them off; when a checklist is completed, he plucks the next from the air, seeing it’s drifted a few centimetres since the last time he looked.

  Once he completes the SA checks, he reports to Mission Control. The SA is the re-entry capsule that will carry him back down to Earth on his return. All its systems are operational. The voice he hears back is Gevorkian’s; cosmonauts take turns being the sole member of Mission Control permitted to contact the man in space. Gevorkian clears Yefgenii to proceed into the BO.

  He maneuvers through a tunnel out of the SA. His stomach bobs and bounces with every movement. The contents of his abdominal cavity are floating free, something that can be simulated on Earth for only a matter of seconds. He’s been weightless for over an hour now, the whole time working and moving, looking for handholds and pitching in every direction. Nausea drags at his stomach.

  Emerging from the short access tunnel into the BO, Voskhodyeniye’s living compartment, he finds more space to work in, and he gets to it straight away. Above the storage locker that contains the Krechet lunar suit, he finds the main instrumentation console, and begins a long work routine of systems tests and checks. By the time he’s finished he’s circled the Earth and not once glanced out of the portholes to his left and behind him.

  Next is scheduled a fifteen-minute break to rest, his first since lift off, and take on water. He drinks from a plastic bottle with a tube and valve from which he sucks in a predetermined load of 500 millilitres of fluid. While he rests, he hovers in the middle of the BO in a fetal position. Without gravity his legs tend to curl up toward his body. Optics obstruct his view out of most of the portholes, but in the gaps he can see segments of Earth and sky. The Earth is huge and brilliant, the sunny part of the sky so bright he must blot it out with metal blinds.

  His next assignment is navigation. The rest break allows time to return to darkness, but he’s tense and restless, concerned at falling behind in the next critical phase of his work cycle.

  The Sun swings behind the world. Night engulfs him. Cabin lights are the only illumination. He dims them and places himself at the portholes, where he secures his position by gripping the handholds. The dull metal craft plunges through space, its portholes pale beacons containing the silhouette of a man, and the only other lights are the stars themselves.

  He searches the visible segments of sky for a recognizable pattern of stars. Prior to launch he’s learned the specific stars that provide the necessary flight-guidance datum measurements at specific points in the voyage to the Moon. Ground simulations assumed he could visualize the constellation Centaurus. It’s his responsibility alone; installing a computer that could carry out the task would have consumed precious months.

  His eyes take time to adjust to the darkness. He experiences a few moments of panic, of feeling that this one task is beyond him and therefore so is the entire enterprise. Soon he’s confident of what he sees. He presses his face to the eyepiece of a sextant mounted in the porthole, aims at the star Menkent, the first datum star, and then sets about aligning it with the Earth’s horizon.

  In darkness the arching edge of the planet is invisible. Instead he notes a blank zone of space where the stars disappear: this can only be the Earth. He holds Menkent in the eyepiece and moves the sextant arm in tiny increments until its image becomes superimposed with the edge of the blank zone. His body drifts, losing him the picture. He uses his knees to secure his lower body against the bulkhead; he stiffens his free arm on the handhold.

  He tries again. The airglow extinguishes the star but then it relights for a fraction of a second between the airglow and the hard black edge of the world. The tiniest shift in position will invalidate the measurement. The muscles of his arms and legs ache. At last he superimposes the image of the star on the horizon. He shines a dim penlight onto the sextant scale and struggles to read the angle. He manages to accommodate, and he scribbles the result on the pad built into the thigh of his suit. The scratching of his pencil makes the loudest noise in the void.

  His orders are to input the angle into the flight-guidance computer before moving on to the second measurement, but he knows he’s taken too long recording the first, and is in danger of losing the darkness. Adding another orbit to the flight plan will jeopardize the timing of the launch toward the Moon.

  He searches for the constellation Sagittarius. He finds it and identifies the datum star, Nunki. He sets his body rigid again. He feels a small discomfort rising from the base of his back. With a tremulous free hand, he edges the sextant arm along the scale until the datum star drowns in the muddiness of the atmosphere. He sets the arm and shines the penlight. He reads off the angle and notes it on his thigh-pad.

  Releasing his grip on the handhold, he pushes off toward the control panel. He raises the cabin lights and then begins to punch the figures into the onboard computer. At the same time he reads them out to Mission Control. Their computers and the spacecraft’s onboard computer produce identical calculations. Voskhodyeniye is established in an elliptical orbit spanning 200 by 740 kilometres at an inclination to the ecliptic of 50.7 degrees, the exact orbit decreed by the flight plan.

  Gevorkian’s voice squeaks out of the earpiece cushioned in the soft leather of Yefgenii’s communications helmet. “Voskhodyeniye, you are go to power up the LK.”

  A hawser stretches from the LOK to the LK, a short stout umbilical cord containing the electrical cables through which the LOK, the command module of the stack, powers the lander’s systems, charges its batteries, and monitors its condition. Yefgenii sets about bringing the LK to life from the remote-command console in the BO. Through the viewport of the docking cupola he watches the lander’s lights blink on. They cast a glow across the divide between the two ships. Inside the LK, gauges flash, fans start to turn.

  The Sun flows like syrup off the edge of the world, forming a blinding globule of light that pierces the cabin where Yefgenii toils to prepare his craft for the next stage of the journey. The timing is exact. Via Gevorkian he receives Mission Control’s clearance to carry out the EVA and LK systems check.

  Yefgenii has just over ninety minutes to prepare for the EVA, the duration of one revolution round the Earth. He removes the items he’s stored in the locker below the main instrument console, pulling on silk lining gloves and then the Orlan suit’s bulky space gloves. He puts a clear bubble helmet over his leather communications cap and locks it into the space suit’s metal collar. He checks the suit’s environmental control systems. The readings come back nominal. Heating and oxygen supply are in perfect operation. He breathes pure oxygen, purging nitrogen from his blood to prevent the bends.

  Next he sets about depressurizing the BO. He seals off the access tunnel to the SA and then operates the spacecraft’s environmental control system to vent the atmosphere pressurized within the BO. He hears the rush of the atmosphere being evacuated. The ambient noises of the spacecraft cabin grow quieter. When he is in vacuum, the ship is
silent. The sound of his own breathing fills his helmet. He endeavors to disregard it, to not become focused on the process of inspiration and expiration.

  The suit’s interior is pressurized. Pushing out against vacuum, the suit stiffens like an inflating life vest, becoming inflexible as armor. Every change of posture demands strong muscular effort.

  Yefgenii dons the EVA helmet. The protective metal dome covers the inner bubble and locks down onto the metal collar. A visor screens out sunlight. He floats to the hatch in the lower part of the bulkhead to the right of the control panel. He turns the heavy levers that release the hatch from its locks. He swings the hatch open. The procedure has been timed to coincide with the end of the rev. Voskhodyeniye has passed from day into night, and now dawn is breaking once again; the next rev begins, the daylit portion measuring a little over three-quarters of an hour as the spacecraft orbits the world.

  A safety line tethers him to the ship. He hangs out of the hatch, under the scrutiny of a television camera in the BO. He awaits the order to go. His heart quickens.

  “Voskhodyeniye, we are visual with you.” Gevorkian’s voice fills his ears, for a moment replaces the accelerating cycle of his respiration. “You look well, comrade. Proceed with EVA. And good luck!”

  Yefgenii passes his head and shoulders through the hatch. His size coupled with the bulk of the space suit creates a tight squeeze. Earth opens out behind his head. He arches his neck and into his upper field of vision drifts the north polar ice cap. Sudden vertigo spins his gaze. He feels nauseated. He grabs at the rail welded onto the outer hull of the BO. In this extraordinary moment he fears he will vomit inside his helmet.

  His heart is racing. The electrodes stuck to his chest, for which his chest was shaved the day before launch, are transmitting a continuous ECG to the flight physicians’ consoles in Moscow. Gevorkian’s voice cuts through the sound of his hyperventilation. For the first time he sounds urgent. “The senior flight physician requests you report your condition.”