First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  In the far corner, a frail woman named Zlata ran on the treadmill. She tried hard, but the pace was clearly too quick for her. She stumbled, swiping a hand for the rail. She missed, and the shift in weight pushed her top half forward as the treadmill pulled her tangled feet back. She plummeted face-first and was propelled from the track to the floor. The technician there hung her head, waiting long seconds before offering assistance.

  It had been since the first five cosmonauts were but children that the Chief Designer had seen such a complete display of incompetence. It was forgivable in the children, but these were adults, trained pilots. He had requested only the best. He had been promised the elite. He hoped, for the sake of the Soviet Union, that this was not the best the air force had to offer.

  A hearty laugh came from behind him.

  “Did you see her fall? That was truly comical, comrade.”

  “Ignatius,” said the Chief Designer. “I suppose it’s good to see you.”

  She had not visited Star City since the day Giorgi died, but the Chief Designer almost expected her sudden appearance. A surprise that happens often enough ceases to be surprising.

  “I’m certainly better to look at than anything occurring in this room,” she said.

  The Chief Designer held his forehead and laughed despite himself. “Wasn’t this undertaking enough of a comedy to begin with? We didn’t need the addition of clowns.”

  “Giorgi was the best,” said Ignatius.

  “I don’t expect another Giorgi, but surely the air force has better pilots than this.”

  “Of course they do, but they have no intention of sending them to you. Do you know how you got Giorgi? Marshal Nedelin. He was the one who secured the best people for the space program. Now that he’s gone, the air force has no one to hold them accountable. They use the space program to shuttle off their worst recruits. Everyone here has been declared unfit for flight.”

  “And I’m supposed to prepare them for space?”

  “If it’s any comfort, they sent even worse pilots to the General Designer.”

  “Actually, that’s the first small comfort I’ve had in weeks. I never thought relief would come from you, Ignatius.” He rubbed the scar on his head. “Have you heard from them?”

  “I haven’t seen them since the funeral, same as you.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “You missed me?”

  “I thought you’d have answers. Do you know where they went?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell them to leave?”

  “I encouraged them.”

  “I’ve never thought that you were on my side, so how is it that you were able to betray me?”

  “I protected you from yourself. If Nadya had died, I wouldn’t have been able to protect you in the investigations that followed. The Party would have discovered all your secrets.”

  “I find it hard to believe that you’ve been protecting me.”

  “Just because it’s difficult to believe doesn’t mean it’s not true. For example, knowing what I do about you, it’s hard to believe that you’re a kind and empathetic man.”

  The Chief Designer found himself grinding his teeth. He relaxed his jaw and rubbed at his cheek. Kind was not a word he would ever use to describe himself, and it seemed to grow less apt every day. It was not only these pitiful excuses for pilots he had now. No, he did not know how one of them would ever successfully dock Voskhod with Vostok, but so much of that was controlled from the ground. He only needed one pilot to be just competent enough for the five minutes of the final docking maneuvers. He doubted he would get even that, but doubt was a feeling he was accustomed to.

  The real problem was the dogs. Khrushchev’s dog they could bring back. If the plan worked, they needed no double. But Kasha. Khrushchev asked about her in every correspondence, as if she, like Byelka, were his. For every hour spent training the new cosmonauts, Mishin and Bushuyev had spent two scouring the streets of Moscow for a dog that looked like Kasha. The Chief Designer knew better than to inquire, but he was sure that some of the dogs they brought in had not come from the streets, but had been pets. They were too clean, too pampered. They had the wrong disposition entirely. Anything unexpected terrified them. It did not matter, anyway. None of them looked the least bit like Kasha. The most similar dog had the same shape as Kasha but deep brown fur. Mishin and Bushuyev had tried to bleach it white, but the closest they could get was tan. The poor dog’s skin was so tender after bleaching that it was a week before she would allow anyone to pet her.

  “Will they come back?” asked the Chief Designer.

  “I believe so,” said Ignatius. “And if they do, I’ll encourage them to stay. I’ve seen your latest reports. You’re ready for Nadya. I admit that I doubted you would be. I focus so much on failure—it’s my job, after all, to prevent it—that I often have a hard time anticipating success. Still, I stand by my decision. When I sent them away, all you had to offer was failure.”

  No one outside of Star City was supposed to have seen the latest reports. It did not surprise the Chief Designer, though, that Ignatius had seen them. Whether or not he was ready, even he was not sure of that.

  “They’ve already been gone over a month,” he said.

  “It’s their first taste of independence since they were children. But even the most delicious food can only be consumed a dish at a time. Nadya thinks of you as a father.”

  “That I am most definitely not. Not even to my own son.”

  “Again, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Truth and belief are unrelated.”

  The custodian walked by them, bucket swaying from his hand, as if what was inside did not repulse him. And perhaps it did not. His constitution was certainly better than Kolya’s. The Chief Designer would learn this custodian’s name, train him for spaceflight, make of him the next hero of the Soviet Union. This custodian would become the first person to clean in outer space.

  “You smile,” said Ignatius.

  “I just had an amusing thought,” said the Chief Designer.

  “Will you share?”

  He would have liked to, but he did not know how. It had all become so absurd. The only thing he could think of that would be more absurd would be to try to explain the absurdity.

  “Chief Designer.” The voice came from behind him.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, not turning.

  A small yip sounded. At first the Chief Designer thought Galina was back on the vibration platform, but this yip had come from the wrong direction. He turned.

  Leonid stood there, Kasha in his arms, Nadya lurking in the doorway behind him. Her hair had grown longer. Leonid’s whiskers threatened to fill out into a beard. And little Kasha. She had not changed at all.

  “We’re back,” said Leonid.

  The Chief Designer found himself holding his breath, as if to exhale would blow away the apparition before him. He looked at Ignatius.

  “You knew they were back?” he asked Ignatius.

  “I was notified that they had boarded a train bound for Moscow.”

  “So you lied to me.”

  “I prefer not to deliver good news.”

  The Chief Designer could not bring himself to look at Leonid, even though he yearned to see him, and even more to see Nadya, the woman who thought of him as a father. He still did not believe it, and he feared looking at her, that the expression on her face would reveal the error of Ignatius’s claim.

  “What should I do?” the Chief Designer asked Ignatius.

  “I would start by sending these other so-called pilots back to where they came from.”

  The Chief Designer glanced sidelong at his cosmonauts. Kasha, the little white dog, tail wagging, tongue flapped out the side of her mouth, seemed happy to have returned. The other two showed no emotion, Nadya even less so than usual.

&nbs
p; “Mishin, Bushuyev,” called the Chief Designer.

  The two men left Kolya, still doubled over in the Khilov swing, and hurried toward the door. They stopped short at the sight of Leonid and Nadya.

  “You can send the other pilots home,” said the Chief Designer.

  “Thank god,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.

  They walked around the Chief Designer and greeted first Leonid and then Nadya. The two men smiled, revealing a real sort of happiness, not just at having capable cosmonauts again, but at the return of old friends. The Chief Designer had resented them for having let Leonid and Nadya go. He felt sure that in their place, he would have been able to stop them. But with this reunion, he saw that Mishin and Bushuyev understood family in a way that he never would. For someone who had sent so many of his children permanently away, he had never learned that one aspect of family was parting. Family is not necessarily the place where one is, but where one returns, given the chance.

  The Chief Designer looked Nadya in the eye. “Thank you.”

  “We should talk,” said Leonid.

  He set Kasha on the floor and left in the direction of the Chief Designer’s office.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVERYTHING IN THE OFFICE felt too large. Leonid sat in one of the guest chairs, the seat wide enough to have held him and his brother both. The desk seemed built for ogres. The chair on the other side like a throne. In it, the Chief Designer looked smaller. Less like a bear and more like a cub. It was not just the chair. Something in the man’s expression, in how he looked at Leonid, had changed. He remembered the same look on Grandmother’s face just before he and his brother left the valley.

  Leonid spoke the Chief Designer’s name. The Chief Designer’s composure flickered for a moment, but he pulled his face into a grin.

  “How did you learn that?” asked the Chief Designer.

  “I spoke to Leonid. I spoke to my brother.”

  This time the Chief Designer’s composure failed him. He looked like he might be ill, or burst into tears, or both.

  “How?”

  “Tsiolkovski. He’s communicated with all the cosmonauts.”

  “From beyond the grave?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “Alive?”

  “More or less.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I think he would prefer no one to know. Also, he’s mostly insane.”

  “Tsiolkovski always had strange ideas.”

  “I remembered him as a younger man. Someone in control. I suppose he was old even then, his grip already in the midst of failing him.”

  “His generation, even mine, we pretend control even when we have none. It was the only way to survive the bad times. After the Revolution and through the war.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that Leonid was still alive?”

  “He’s as good as dead, Leonid. Already his life is an impossibility.”

  “That’s different from any life how?”

  The Chief Designer smiled again. He had known Leonid for the majority of the man’s life, but only now realized that he did not know him well at all.

  “Why did you return?” asked the Chief Designer.

  “My brother told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That after Nadya died, the other Nadya, you gave the remaining cosmonauts a choice. They all chose to fly, even when they knew it would mean dying. I don’t free you from blame, but I must blame my brother, as well. He’s a damned fool. If you’re guilty of something, it’s raising him to be one.”

  “I have lately been thinking that while I gave them a choice, I never asked if it was what they wanted. I have spent the better part of my own life making choices that are contrary to my wants.”

  “Leonid also told me that you apologized to him.”

  “I won’t lie to you now. I’ve done no such thing.”

  “He said he didn’t think you knew that your apology reached him. He said that you must have come into the radio room one night when he was out of range. As his orbit brought him over Star City, he heard the ghost of your voice, saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, the sound growing stronger with each repetition. When the signal was finally strong enough for him to answer, you were gone, and Mars greeted him instead.”

  The Chief Designer recalled that sleepless night. It was only a few days after Nadya and Leonid ran away. He had woken from nightmares. Not an uncommon occurrence, but usually they took him back to the long-ago past, to icy nights on the tundra. This one was set in the present. He was surrounded by everyone he knew: Nadya, Leonid, Mars, Yuri, Valentina, his wife, his son, Mishin, Bushuyev, Giorgi, Nedelin, Tsiolkovski, Khrushchev, Ignatius, even the General Designer. They were all there to congratulate the Chief Designer, but as he thanked them they each burst into flame. The fire consumed them slowly. They did not change to look like Giorgi’s body, brittle and blackened. Instead they evaporated, from foot to face, a layer at a time like the heat shield. They kept congratulating him, heaping up the most effusive praise, until their mouths were finally consumed. Nadya was the last one to disappear. The Chief Designer stood in the middle of beige, endless terrain, like Baikonur but lacking even the few features that made up that dull landscape. He felt himself on fire. First his teeth disappeared from his mouth. That was when he woke, a feeling he could not identify clenched in both his gut and his mind. He felt near panicked that there was something he had forgotten to do. Something essential. He cried. He had not cried, not really, since he was a boy. Shrugging on his robe and stepping into a pair of old shoes he used as slippers, he went to the radio room. He had not planned to go there, it just happened. It was as if he were still asleep, still in part of the dream. Until now, he was not entirely sure that he had not been dreaming the whole time.

  “What did you say to each other?” asked the Chief Designer.

  “What is there to say? He’s a stranger now. Do you ever stop to consider how many strangers share your name?”

  “It’s not so rare a name.”

  “Perhaps that’s why a title is better.”

  “So you came back to discuss names and titles?”

  “Honestly, Chief Designer, it wasn’t me who came back. It was Nadya. I simply followed. She wants to fly the mission. And don’t think that I didn’t try to talk her out of it.”

  There was a report on the new ablative heat shield on the desk. The Chief Designer turned the pages without reading them, without even looking.

  “Things might have been better if you could have convinced her.”

  “That’s how your spaceships work, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The things fly themselves, and the cosmonaut’s just a passive passenger.”

  “Yes.” The Chief Designer smiled.

  “It turns out that I never learned what to do when given the controls. I only end up where I’m guided.”

  “You know, sometimes I envy you that.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  Leonid stood, knocking the chair back several inches.

  “My brother told me the details of the next mission. A docking in space. Can’t you try to save him instead of the dogs?”

  “His Vostok has no docking clamp. Even if we could meet it in space, the best we could do would be to bounce the two capsules against each other like billiard balls.” The Chief Designer wondered who had told the other Leonid about the mission. It must have been Mars, but that didn’t really answer the question. Who told Mars? Not that it mattered. The Chief Designer was too used to the truth slipping out.

  “I know,” said Leonid.

  “Then why did you ask?”

  “I guess I hoped that you’d surprise me.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes and no. How soon until the launch?”

  �
��Two weeks.”

  “Have I ever told you the story of the man my village was named after?”

  “I know of the man, of course. He’s celebrated in Russian history, as well. But tell me.”

  “Bohdan Zinoviy Mykhaylovych Khmelnytsky had crushed the Poles in battle after battle. Starting at the mouth of the Dnieper, where he had once returned to Ukrainian soil after years of slavery, he overthrew the Zaporozhian Sich, and then moved upstream, taking Dnepropetrovsk and Kremenchuk and Cherkasy all the way to Kiev. He was welcomed to the capital on Christmas Day, his procession the grandest parade in the city’s history. Streets were strung across with garlands and every window burned with candles and bands interspersed themselves with the soldiers, playing the kind of joyous songs as had not been heard in Kiev for a hundred years. Parents offered their sons to Khmelnytsky that he might raise them to be great men.

  “At a gathering of Cossack nobles, such as a Cossack might be accused of nobility, Khmelnytsky claimed not just the right to rule the Zaporozhian Cossacks but the whole of Ukraine. He became in fact, if not in name, ruler of what would become our nation. From untried soldier to slave to officer to king, somehow he’d not only survived his trials but used them to shape himself into the man of the moment, a hero and a savior. His battles weren’t over, no. The Poles didn’t much care for him and attacked at every opportunity, but Khmelnytsky always prevailed. Maybe the best measure of his greatness is that his successors could not hold Ukraine together.”

  “A great man, yes,” said the Chief Designer.

  “Grandmother always shared his stories with us, but she left out part of his life. I wouldn’t learn of it until much later, in a book Giorgi leant me. I believe it was a book he shouldn’t have had in the first place, certainly not one that had been approved by Glavlit. It made me realize that Grandmother’s stories were just that: stories. In fact, Khmelnytsky had as many failures as successes. More than that, he had as many moments of cruelty as he did of glory.