He squeezes out of the hatch. He glimpses the payload shroud like the leaves of a closed tulip drifting away from the stack in a line of space debris backed by the blackened Block G engine. The giant metal staves of the shroud rotate in a slow dance with the other debris, glinting under incident sunlight.
Yefgenii fixes his position on the handrail to survey the stack. The explosion has damaged the part of Voskhodyeniye’s power module adjacent to the Block G. A crack punctures the tank of liquid oxygen feeding the fuel cells that produce electricity for the spacecraft. Gas is escaping into space, sublimating to ice in an instant. A tiny thread of crystals weaves back toward the shroud and the jettisoned Block G. Now he understands how the explosion has caused power fluctuations throughout the stack; in response to a loss of pressure, the fuel-cell safety valves have closed.
He changes direction and maneuvers along the handrails toward the power module. With every grab of a handhold, an equal and opposite force causes him to spin and topple. The tether snakes behind him, transmitting disorienting sinusoidal waves of force up and down the line. He strains to control his motion. His muscles ache. Sweat drips and stinks inside his suit.
The handrails run out before he reaches the power module, since no EVA has been planned to operate in this area of the spacecraft. The trailing edge of the engine curves beyond reach. Aft spreads the coiling filament of ice crystals venting from the lox tank, the payload shroud and the Block G. The Earth burns beyond. The blue disc is diminishing. His chances of returning home are diminishing.
He secures the tethering line in his hand and endeavors to push himself along the hull toward the tank. The first push carries him away from the spacecraft and now he drifts away in a slow backflip. He topples backward and when he is next upright he glimpses the hull more distant and the cord of his tether lengthening. He can gain no purchase to correct the topple so he can only wait till the line pulls taut. In midroll he reaches the end of the tether; he feels a tug as it snaps tight and then he’s sprung back toward the hull. Not only is he toppling but he has now been thrown into a slow cartwheel. As he approaches the hull he gathers in loops of tether, so, when he bounces off again, the shorter length wrenches on his hands and prevents him from drifting so far out into space on this oscillation; and so he continues, toppling and cartwheeling as he oscillates along the hull of the spacecraft making slow painful progress toward the leaking lox tank.
When at last he reaches the tank, his helmet strikes the hull and he bounces away again. By controlling the length of the tether he manages to reduce the amplitude of the oscillations, but in doing so he converts the energy into angular momentum. Yefgenii spins and topples faster, he hits the hull harder. He is nauseated and hyperventilating.
On his next bounce he attempts to grab a section of pipework, but his thick gloves glance off and he topples away again. His direction has changed; now when he draws in the tether he moves more or less in parallel to the line of the hull and back toward the hatch. He has been tumbling in space for almost half an hour and, at the end of it, he is floating back toward the handrails where his EVA commenced. He grabs the first rail but can’t close his grip fast enough. The contact twists him into a salchow but on the third rotation he grabs at the next rail and this time clings on.
Yefgenii feels his heart drumming inside his chest. He is hyperventilating. Sweat drips from his brow and stings his eyes. He decides he can’t afford to expend more time and effort inspecting the ruptured tank and must press on with his effort to enter the LK.
He attempts to activate the boom but the power supply has died. He moves hand over hand toward the LK. He is overheating inside his suit. The environmental controls can’t cope with the amount of sweat and CO2 he’s pumping out, and now his visor starts to fog. In patches the solar screen clouds. At first he can see through the gaps but soon the whole visor is misted. The LK hatch is ahead of him but, after his experience in trying to inspect the lox tank, he dare not risk attempting to float the short distance between the two ships. He pulls himself up toward the LOK’s docking probe and then transfers his grip to the hexagonal docking array on the roof of the lander. His gloved fingers just about squeeze into the holes.
Using this position as a base camp, he allows himself a minute’s rest to bring down his heart and respiratory rates. He runs a loop of his tethering line over a spacing bar of the docking probe. With the tip of his nose, he wipes an opening in the misted visor.
Now he eases along the lander’s hull toward the hatch. The LK is even more fragile than the LOK, so he resists the urge to grab on to any part of it save the handholds circling the hatch. The slightest push sets him in motion and he is no longer travelling parallel to the hull. He is drifting in the direction of the hatch but away from the lander. He reaches out in panic and clips the handrail with his fingertips. He enters a slow rotation. He gathers in his tether and it pulls tight on the docking probe, so that he is sprung back in the direction he has travelled but at a slightly slower rate, slow enough for him this time to grab the handhold and come to rest at the hatch of the LK.
Once again with the tip of his nose he wipes an iris in the mist of his visor. He activates the controls on the outside of the hatch to open the port and he is grateful that they work. The lander’s batteries should still retain much of the charge present when he switched the LK into its dormant mode for the transit to the Moon.
He struggles through the oval opening. His suit has swollen and stiffened, or so it seems, but more likely his muscles have weakened. He clambers into the lander and works the levers of the hatch closed. The lights are on, and he’s able to pressurize the cabin.
As the atmospheric pressure rises, he feels his spacesuit soften. The material becomes flexible again, but in moving with greater freedom he realizes the inner layers covering his armpits and lower back are soaked and so heavy with sweat they’re like wet rags.
With enormous relief he removes his gloves, EVA helmet and bubble helmet. Steam issues from his collar and cuffs. His face is bright red, his hands are swollen. He is gasping for breath but the heating system has yet to warm the LK, or it’s failed, so that his teeth and tongue are chilled by mouthfuls of frozen air.
At once he sets to work powering up the LK’s communications system. As with the LOK, sporadic electrical failures affect the vehicle’s control systems. A power surge has travelled throughout the stack, to the LK possibly from the LOK via the umbilical connection. In any event, he is unable to activate the radio.
Yefgenii toils through a sequence of procedures to open communications. The checklists in the LK offer him a number of alternatives. He tries them all, one by one. He resets switches. He shuts down related systems. He powers up related systems. He repeats the sequence again in its entirety, without success.
He drifts for a time in the cabin. Through the upper viewport he gazes at the arching back of the Voskhodyeniye stack. A curve of metal slices the Earth into a glowing crescent of blue and white. He decides to try once again to activate the radio. He turns all the control switches to off and then throws them on one by one. He trips and resets the circuit breaker. The lander’s radio is as dead as the LOK’s. The crescented Earth hangs in the upper viewport like the downturned mouth of a sorrowful cartoon.
Following a rapid assessment, Yefgenii concludes that while many of the lander’s essential operating systems show promise, in their present condition none of them gives him the option of relaying a message to Earth. The LK possesses no power supply of its own. Apart from the charge in its batteries, it depends on the LOK for electricity.
Yefgenii wipes his visor clean with his silk lining gloves and then relocks the helmets and outer gloves to the suit’s metal collar and cuffs. He is anxious and depressed but cannot afford to let himself get diverted. With as much haste as he can muster in his state of fatigue, he shuts down the LK’s systems. The lander returns to its dormant state, its batteries spared for another day.
He clambers out of the hatch into u
nfiltered sunlight. The roll of the spacecraft caused by the Block G explosion has oriented the hatches toward the blinding yellow disc. The space suit’s protective layers shield his body from the unattenuated radiation, but, as Yefgenii slides along the tethering line, he begins to feel a scorching pain in his side. He concludes that one or two layers must have torn as he fought to right himself during the earlier violent toppling movements. Now every panel of the spacecraft’s hull beams burning UV light at him.
The thread of frozen gas coils from the damaged lox tank back toward the diminishing Earth. This time he is determined to reach the tank in the simplest manner. Gathering in the tether, he floats on past the LOK hatch and aft toward the power module, and now begins to let out the tether with the correct timing to stop it from snapping taut and springing him back or out or whichever wrong way.
Yefgenii manages to ease himself into a small turn, angling his scorched side away from the Sun, and feels a sudden drop in heat and pain. He drifts to the tank and at close quarters inspects the crack in its casing like a crack in an eggshell. One small puncture vents the oxygen. The gas freezes in an instant. The sight is strange. He feels he is watching snowflakes form; he is watching the processes of nature laid bare.
He presses his glove over the puncture. He is able to mend small punctures in his suit with a repair kit and this is the only means at his disposal for attempting to contain the lox leak. He removes his hand to reveal a plaque of ice that pops open with the pressure of gas behind it, the plaque shattering into shards of crystals.
Yefgenii opens the repair kit. In looking down into it, he enters a very slow tumble, which he corrects by throwing his free hand out onto the hull. He bounces off and tumbles in the opposite direction. He feels pain tear at the scorched section of his skin and then, as it turns into the Sun, he feels it light like a fire. He screams in pain but fights not to oppose the rotation. He lets it hurt and then it passes as his body rotates into its own shadow. He brings out the sticky patch from the repair kit and struggles to hold it between fat swollen inflexible fingertips. He is unable to manipulate the patch and unable to uncover the adhesive backing, his fingers are too fat and rigid in the space gloves. He keeps on trying. He is tumbling end over end and he is getting sick, but he keeps struggling to get the patch into a form he can use to stem the leaking lifeblood of his spacecraft, but it’s beyond him, it’s beyond any man, and the patch slips from between his fingers and he lunges for it, but the gloves are too thick and rigid and he is now turning in the wrong direction, turning to the Sun again; this time, when the sunlight strikes, he can’t hold back, he emits a deep primal roar that fills his space suit and reverberates through every layer and joint of it but in the vacuum of space travels no farther.
HE FEELS THE HEAT OF THE SUN on his body, the solid band of light that divides the BO into day and night. Soon the sunward portion of the spacecraft will overheat and the shaded side freeze. He returns to the pilot’s seat and straps himself in. He sets and fires a thruster. Voskhodyeniye jerks into a slow roll, but, without the computer’s assistance, he can manage the maneuver in only an imprecise fashion, so that the spacecraft’s rotation is skewed by small amounts of pitch and yaw. He’s trying to get the whole stack turning, the LOK and the docked lander, but as a result Voskhodyeniye is also wobbling. He feels something in his stomach, the subclinical nausea experienced in an aircraft flying out of rudder trim, but he’s done the best he can, and, as the stack rolls, the solar heating is distributed over its shell with an approximate uniformity. He’ll have to live with the nausea.
When he pauses to take stock, he becomes conscious of the agony of his sunburn. A scarlet triangle has blistered and tightened on his flank. The spacecraft carries no dressings or ointments; not another gram of weight could’ve been added to the launch payload. He must take water to avoid dehydration; he must keep the lesion clean to avoid infection. The pain he can only endure.
Out of a porthole, Yefgenii sees that the debris that shook loose when he jettisoned the Block G engine has now drifted clear of the spacecraft. The Block G itself glides about 500 metres behind, no longer shedding small showers of ice, and nearby float the staves of the payload shroud that resemble the leaves of a tulip curling open to the Sun.
He searches for the trail of vented gas. The ship continues its slow roll, and this is how he eventually gets to see it, as the sunlight rolls onto a gentle curving arc of ice crystals threading out from somewhere on the spacecraft and trailing away into space. The tank is still venting. No measure at his disposal can stem the leak. He’s losing the raw material from which Voskhodyeniye’s fuel cells generate electricity, water and oxygen.
The mission is almost certainly lost. He may never get home. He feels deep, depressing failure. Time is sliding by.
A single act can define the meaning of a man’s life. Everything to this point has been a rehearsal. The boy who ascended from the ruins of Stalingrad to the realm of space, the man hardened by cold and exile, this man has longed for the clash of metal against metal in a sky gleaming with beautiful machines, the climactic clash of cymbals of the two greatest powers in history. Like Gagarin, he has become his country. More: a hand drifts in front of the Earth framed in the porthole, and covers it. In space, a man is the size of countries. He must act, he must do what no one else could achieve. Throughout his career, he has craved a mission such as this one. Now he has it.
Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin unstows the emergency procedures checklists and begins to follow the protocols, using his penlight when the rotation of the craft transports his section of the BO into darkness, and bringing the metal blinds down when the Sun comes in, leaving just a crack of attenuated sunlight that sprays through the cabin.
He identifies which of the spacecraft’s systems are functioning and which are not. The environmental control system, which oxygenates and purifies the cabin atmosphere, is working. The flight-control systems are working when governed manually. The flight computer has crashed and is not recovering when rebooted. The communications system is not functioning.
This task carries him through to the end of his second diurnal cycle in space. Because of his absorption in work, he’s missed his food, fluid and rest breaks. He has made himself ill. His sunburn is agonizing. He is hungry, but hunger has become a moral ally in recent years: it reminds him he is disciplined, he will push himself farther than the ordinary man. He is dehydrated, but gulps of warm water renew him. He’s tempted to press on, but he is too weary. He opens the plastic pouches and metal tubes and consumes cubes of cheese and borscht in the form of a bland chewy paste. He needs to urinate again. His piss is an even deeper yellow. When he jettisons the waste into space, it doesn’t stream toward Earth; instead the crystals glide on the gentle escarpments of gravity, neither toward the planet nor away from it. One day, the ice may be captured by Earth’s pull, but till then it’ll drift in this cislunar space for countless centuries.
A little of the drinking water he lets out into the air. It forms a perfect sphere that wobbles and drifts in front of his eyes. He captures it in a cloth and lays it on the patch of sunburnt skin that forms a bright red triangle on his right flank. He winces. Every movement hurts. The cloth applies dampness for a mere moment, then, without gravity to hold it in place, it drifts off into the cabin. He snatches it and wrings out a tiny drop that hangs in the air for him to swallow. Then he sets aside the pain and returns to work.
According to the flight plan, now is the period to use any spare time for photography. Voskhodyeniye’s rotation is imperceptible apart from the creep of Earth and Moon across the portholes. Yefgenii keys the camera mounted in an optical port and shoots a series of images of the Earth setting and sometime later the Moon rising.
The Moon is waning gibbous. The Sun lights its surface from the west as far as the Sea of Serenity. His eyes rest on the Ocean of Storms, an ancient lava field stretching to the western limb of the lunar disc. Within its bounds lies the landing site selected for th
e mission, on a basalt plain about 500 kilometres west of the crater Kepler. These features are clearer and larger than he’s ever seen. The Moon is growing, though he knows he must be decelerating. The Earth’s pull is slowing the ship down but won’t ever quite stop it crossing the gravitational ridge into the Moon’s influence, and then the Moon will draw him in, ever faster.
Behind Voskhodyeniye the Earth is shrinking. Now it’s small enough to be banded by the porthole’s metal frame.
Yefgenii knows he is presumed lost. On Earth, his colleagues must consider the most likely explanation: that a catastrophic explosion occurred during the burn of the rocket engine. He pictures Gevorkian conveying the news to the widow, or perhaps another cosmonaut that she’d know, like Ges or Leonov. She remained at home with the children as he made final preparations at Baikonur, forbidden to attend Mission Control because it’s bad luck to lay eyes on a woman, except of course if she’s a technician. The night before liftoff, he went through the rituals, “for luck,” of transferring to the small house where Gagarin spent the night before his flight, of taking a sip of champagne with breakfast, of pissing on the wheel of the bus that carried him to the pad. An official telephoned her with the good news: liftoff was successful. He imagines she wept with relief. She hugged the children to her chest. The next call came: successful orbit, but then nothing. So there she is, in the apartment, as Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it falls to, informs her they’ve lost contact with Voskhodyeniye. There’s another knock at the door. It’s Ges’s wife, perhaps; another cosmonaut family will take care of the children, just for the time being. The hours crawl by. The telephone rings with a sympathy call from a senior space official, Mishin himself or perhaps even Kamanin, who assures her that everything possible is being undertaken to secure her husband’s safe return. She knows that minute by minute the technicians are endeavoring to make contact with the spacecraft; not only are they hearing nothing from the pilot, but also there is no relay of electronic information from the ship’s systems. This is explained in gentle terms by Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it is. An abrupt termination of telemetry signifies a catastrophic event befalling the spacecraft. The timing, the association with an engine firing, in an undertested propulsion system assembled in haste, all these factors together mean they must fear the worst. Of course, she asks if it might be something else, and of course they say, “yes,” but their voices are low and their eyes carry little conviction because a systems failure on the scale that would eliminate total telemetry would in all likelihood also render the spacecraft inoperative. The mission is lost. The craft is lost. Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin is lost.
Ascent by Jed Mercurio Page 16