First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  The driver did not get out right away, as if he believed Leonid’s Ukrainian had somehow been flawed. He looked at Leonid and then at Nadya, and then a coy grin grew under his mustache. “I see, I see,” he said. He held up the money. “This is too much.”

  “For a taxi,” said Leonid. “Or you can ask the woman in the leather jacket for assistance. She’ll return at some point, I’m sure, and will have no trouble getting you to your car.”

  “She’s a scary one! I think I’d rather walk.”

  “Before, I’d have agreed with you. But I’ve learned that what I think I know is often not the truth. You can trust that woman, maybe more than anyone else.”

  The driver glanced at Nadya and then back at Leonid. This time, he did not grin. “Yes, yes. I see what you mean.”

  He exited the car. As he walked away, he whistled a tune that reminded Leonid of Giorgi, a simple melody, something that had been hummed in Ukrainian villages for centuries. Leonid got into the car and closed the door, cutting off the song mid-melody.

  “Get us away from here,” said Leonid. “A couple streets farther up this road is fine.”

  He spread the map out on his lap as Nadya eased the car onto the road, moving alongside the row of black state vehicles. The car lurched to a stop almost immediately. Leonid braced himself against the dashboard.

  He spun to Nadya. “I thought you said you could drive.”

  She did not acknowledge him, staring instead through the windshield. Mishin and Bushuyev stood in the middle of the road, blocking the car’s path. They came to Leonid’s window and waited for him to roll it down. The glass squeaked.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mishin or Bushuyev.

  “When did you learn to drive?” asked the other.

  They looked at each other in a silent conference, nodded, and then asked at the same time, “Where are you going?”

  “Just for a drive,” said Leonid.

  “We’ll be leaving soon.”

  “Yes,” said Leonid.

  “There’s no time for a ride.”

  “This is a ride we should have taken a long time ago,” said Nadya.

  Mishin and Bushuyev conferred silently once again. Leonid started to roll up the window, but Mishin thrust his arm into the gap before it shut completely.

  “We’re so close,” said Mishin. “Finally, after so long, we’re close.”

  “The moon is the same size in the sky,” said Leonid. “Mars is still but a dot. All the sacrifices. All the friends burned up like fuel in a rocket, and we’re closer to nothing.”

  “Do you blame him?” asked Mishin. Bushuyev stood so close behind that it seemed his head sprouted from Mishin’s shoulder.

  “The Chief Designer?” said Leonid. “I used to believe the things he said about a grander purpose, but now I doubt any of it extends beyond himself.”

  “He’s not an evil man, Leonid,” said Mishin. “Misguided, maybe. Blinded, sometimes. But not evil. I wouldn’t even be alive if it were not for him.”

  Bushuyev took a step back, as if Mishin’s statement needed space.

  “I have a hard time imagining the Chief Designer saving a life,” said Nadya. “The score is definitely skewed in the other direction.”

  “You’re too young to remember the purges. Do you know how many colleagues Stalin took from us? He feared the intelligentsia even as he needed scientists. The Chief Designer himself . . . have you not wondered where he got that scar on his head? He spent years in Siberia. He almost died. He witnessed hundreds of people who weren’t so lucky to survive. And then Stalin forgave the Chief Designer, or decided he needed him more than he feared him. And so the Chief Designer returned, and he brought me into OKB-1.

  “I worked for the Chief Designer for years. He came to me or Bushuyev first with every problem. He chose us first for every task. But while Bushuyev was promoted to Deputy, I was left in a low position, an assistant. How I used to stay awake at night and wonder what I’d done to offend the Chief Designer! Bushuyev and I still did the same things. We attended the same meetings. We had the same skills. I started to doubt myself and hate the Chief Designer. Sometimes the other way around. Finally, after years, I’d had enough. The General Designer had not yet established OKB-52, but I knew him, and even though I thought him an ass, the General Designer respected me. He offered me a position as his Deputy. No, I didn’t like him even then, but I needed respect more than I needed to respect the man who gave it to me. When I told the Chief Designer I intended to leave OKB-1, though, he cried. He actually cried. He pled with me to stay, and promised me that it would be worth it, and apologized over and over. I’d only ever seen him burst with anger before, so this new emotion stunned me, so much that I said I would stay without understanding why I agreed to it.

  “Less than a month later, Stalin died. A week after that, I was promoted to Deputy. You see, my grandfather was Jewish. The Chief Designer knew, from his time in the gulag, that one of the quickest ways to draw Stalin’s wrath was to be of Jewish descent. Half the prisoners were people Stalin perceived to be enemies. The other half simply had the wrong ancestors. Entire Jewish families disappeared. Any prominent Russian who had any measure of Jewish blood was transferred away, never to be heard from again. We were all vaguely aware of this at the time. One cannot pretend ignorance when the problem is so obvious, but we knew better than to talk about it. As someone who was separated from his Jewishness, it never occurred to me that the problem might apply to me. My own ambition, my own pride, would have gotten me killed.

  “The Chief Designer did not promote me during Stalin’s lifetime in order to keep me safe. If only he had explained that to me, I wouldn’t have had so hard a time of it, but I choose not to focus on the ways he failed me, when he, without having to, risked himself to protect me.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” asked Nadya.

  “I just ask you to remember that the Chief Designer does care for you. He may not know how to state it. His actions may seem contrary to it. But he has always, as long as I have known him, had a plan.”

  Leonid asked, “If not for his plan, would my brother still be alive today?”

  Mishin flinched. “Maybe so.”

  Leonid felt hot red rise up his neck and into his cheeks. His hand gripped the crank as if he might close the window with Mishin’s arm still inside. The crank was made from the cheapest plastic. Could he squeeze hard enough to shatter it? Nadya took his other hand.

  “We’re leaving,” she said.

  Bushuyev put a hand on Mishin’s shoulder and pulled him away from the car.

  “We didn’t see you,” said Bushuyev.

  But he and Mishin both stared at the car until Nadya maneuvered it around the corner.

  “Perhaps in America it will be a simple matter to go for a drive,” said Nadya. She glanced in the mirror.

  “I would kill for anything in my life to be simple,” said Leonid.

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  Leonid took deep breaths, a calming technique that the Chief Designer had ordered the cosmonauts, and their twins, to master. Even the air he breathed, thought Leonid, would be a reminder of that man. Maybe escape was a fantasy. Leonid unfolded Ignatius’s map and traced his finger along the lines.

  Kaliningrad, Moscow Oblast, Russia—1964

  The Chief Designer met his private car at Domodedovo Airport while the rest of the party took a bus back to Star City. He would have liked to have gone with them. The thought of his bed appealed to him, but it was early still, and he felt he owed it to Giorgi to work even harder than before. His stomach protested, a wash of burning bile welling up at the base of his esophagus. He swallowed hard three times, a trick they taught the cosmonauts to fight nausea, but it was not particularly effective. Heartburn and nausea were different conditions, after all. Had Giorgi felt like this all over? In Siberia, the Chief De
signer had seen men burn their hands over candle flames. They were so cold that they could not feel the heat until it was too late.

  The road paralleled the railway on the route to RKK Energia, his old headquarters before Star City, and still the site of Vostok’s—and now Voskhod’s—final assembly. If one followed the tracks in the other direction, for thousands of kilometers, they would lead eventually to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Every capsule, every piece of every rocket, had already traveled such vast distances before it ever made it into space. The tracks veered away from the road.

  The old part of the factory appeared first through the trees, tall windows surrounding the whole structure, giving off warped, wavy reflections. The walls were crested with a thin outcropping of brick, a pathetic attempt at decoration. His old office was in the narrow turret on the near corner, concrete and glass stretching high above the complex like the control tower back at the airport. It was still his office, he supposed, but he did not recall the last time he had sat at the desk. He wondered if reports piled up there like they did at Star City. He would have to check.

  Here the road intersected the tracks, the car bouncing across the rails, nearly launching the Chief Designer’s head into the ceiling. Thump thump. A crane car, splotched with red rust like patches of inflamed skin, idled on the tracks. A decade ago, he had requisitioned the funds to build a shelter for the crane, but the request had been denied. At least a tarpaulin would have helped, but he had forgotten about the crane until right now. He knew he would forget about it again as soon as he entered the factory.

  His driver parked the car in a weedy patch of dirt by the door to the offices. It was supposed to be the best parking space, the shortest walk in winter from car to front door, but this entrance was the farthest from the factory proper, and a maze of hallways lay between it and any of the destinations the Chief Designer might actually seek out. He exited the car and walked toward the other door, the one that opened directly onto the factory floor, some hundred meters away. He was only halfway there when the rumble started. He felt it first through his feet and then the tall windows rattled in their old frames. He stepped away from the wall, worried that at any moment one of the panes might shake loose. Ripples of heat rose above the factory roof, quivering the trees and clouds beyond. The twin smokestacks of the forge seemed to move as if they were made of the same smoke that burped out of the top of them.

  He was late. The heat shield test had already begun. He hurried, almost trotting, trusting his feet even though the ground seemed at any moment ready to shake from under him. The heat hit even before he rounded the building. Then the glow, still half a kilometer away, emerged like a second sun, but too close, rising from within the earth instead of far over the horizon. The Chief Designer squinted against the blaze. One of his RD-107 engines had been mounted horizontally to a reinforced concrete slab, the open end of the nozzle aimed directly at a working mock-up of Voskhod.

  It was this engine that had destroyed the Chief Designer’s hopes time and again. There had been so many tests that he could identify the exact moment the heat shield would fail by the particular color its surface blazed, as it went from red to orange to cream, and just before it reached white the whole thing would erupt, liquid metal spraying from the structure underneath, solidifying into abstract hunks that still marred the concrete slab like sculpture.

  Shielding his eyes, the Chief Designer fumbled along the wall until he found the door to the control room, little more than a sheet metal hut. The technicians, eyes glued to dials and readouts, did not greet him. One console in the corner let out a repetitive beep, like a heart monitor. A teacup tittered on a saucer. The cup had Nadya’s face printed on it.

  The Chief Designer retrieved a mask from beside the slitted observation window. The mask was patterned after the kind used by welders, but without the lower half, just a glass visor covered with several layers of BoPET, which allowed one to look directly into the flame of the engine, to pick out details that otherwise would have been lost in the blaze. Through the visor, the thrust of the engine always reminded the Chief Designer of Amsel Falls. He and several other engineers had managed to visit the waterfall on their way home from Germany after the war, diverting their convoy, trucks full of V-2 rocket parts and more than a few German scientists, far to the south. It was the only time the Chief Designer had ever left the soil of the Soviet Union. He had wanted something to remember from the trip other than the insides of German bunkers. He could have been executed for that excursion, for risking the precious spoils of war on a personal vacation. But by that point, the Chief Designer was, if not numbed to, at least familiar with the looming threat of execution.

  More than just the sight of the falls, though, the engine reminded him of the sound of cascading water. Amsel Falls had struck him then as the loudest thing he had ever heard. The power of it humbled him. Now, the flames of the engine affected him the same way. He sometimes thought he was too proud a man for his own business. He wanted control, and every test, every launch, every single day reminded him that he had none.

  The heat shield burned at what seemed like a slow pace, concentric rings of bright flame starting from center and burning the surface layer outward, like sheets of paper flaring away one after the other. The color went from orange to yellow to cream. The rings of flame came faster. This was where heat always won. This was the moment when Nadya, the one who died, would have felt the first shudder of a problem as the capsule reentered the atmosphere. She would have had just enough time to wonder about it before the capsule burst apart, disintegrating to nothing.

  The Chief Designer waited for it. He had seen it so often that he did not even hold his breath in hope anymore. But the color endured, creamy instead of virgin white, and the pace of the flames steadied on the surface of the shield. He looked at the clock, counting upward, struggling to make out the numbers through the visor. When he read them, he did not believe. He pulled the mask off to make sure he was reading correctly. He mouthed along with the rising seconds as they ticked off the clock.

  It worked. The General Designer’s heat shield worked. The Chief Designer forgot he had the mask in his hands and dropped it. The sound of the metal on the concrete floor could barely be heard above the engine. He gripped the shoulder of the technician seated nearest him. The technician started, as if the touch were an explosion at the test site.

  “It works,” said the Chief Designer.

  The technician shook her head, unable to hear him.

  He leaned close to her ear and shouted, “It works!”

  The technician nodded once, as if this had been the expected result, as if it had not been preceded by a decade of failures. But this technician was young. For all the Chief Designer knew, it was the first test she had been a part of. They cycled new people onto the heat shield project on a monthly basis, so none of them would have the chance to learn the secret that the heat shield had never actually functioned. But now it did. Now they could launch Giorgi and bring him home . . .

  Giorgi. No, not Giorgi. It was Nadya’s turn again. That was good, was it not? She would have the chance she should have had years ago. The Chief Designer had always secreted the guilty thought that this Nadya, the one trained in spaceflight, would have somehow succeeded where her sister failed. He knew it was not true. He felt ashamed every time he thought it. But now she could prove the point. She could triumph where all else had been lost.

  The thought struck him then, surprising in that it had never occurred to him before: No one had ever asked Nadya or any of the cosmonauts what they thought of the whole grand endeavor. The Chief Designer had dreamed so hard of space since he read Tsiolkovski’s stories as a young man that he could not believe someone might not share the dream. But the twins were conscripts, not volunteers. Their dreams had never been taken into consideration.

  The engine cut off. There, where the flames had been, the mock-up of Voskhod remained.

  St
ar City, Russia—1964

  Leonid’s voice faded up from nothing in the speaker, already in the middle of a sentence as he came into range. Lately, it had been like this. Before, he seemed to know exactly when Star City’s antenna would snare his signal and waited to speak until then. Now he was always halfway through a thought. Mars wondered if Leonid talked for whole orbits now, or if his timing had been thrown off so much that he just started talking a few seconds too soon. There was no way to tell. Leonid’s conversations never seemed to have a proper beginning or end.

  Leonid paused in talking, and Mars realized he had not been paying attention. Mars tried to recall what he had heard, but his mind was blank. He rubbed his face and was surprised to find a beard there, as if it had appeared full-grown just then. Leonid must have a similar beard, he thought. Razors were not among the supplies stashed in Vostok’s few compartments.

  “Did you know that clouds look the same on top as they do on bottom?” asked Leonid.

  “I’ve seen the pictures the Americans took,” said Mars.

  “But the clouds never rain up. Sometimes as I pass over dark patches, beneath which I know the rain falls in torrents, I can’t understand why the same is not true on the other side. I expect to hear the rain splatter against the hull of my little ship. A ship should be in water, yes?”

  “I’m not sure yours would float.”

  “I can’t remember what water looks like. Even the water I had here—I have long since drunk all of it—didn’t look like water. I squeezed some out of the plastic container, but it wouldn’t fall. It just globbed up in front of me. Like a marble. We didn’t have marbles as children. I didn’t even know what they were until Giorgi explained them to me.”

  “Giorgi is . . . Giorgi died.” Mars had refused to attend the funeral, even when the Chief Designer insisted.

  “I know. I’ve been up here forever. Everyone I know is dead.”