“It’s extremely powerful,” Vlad said moodily. “It wants to help us Earthlings, I know it does. It saved Laika, remember?”
“It saved her twice. Did you see the blue dog last night?”
Vlad frowned impatiently. “I saw lots of things last night, Nikita, but now those things are gone.”
“The drive is gone?”
“Oh no,” said Vlad. “I dug it out of the crater this morning.”
He gestured at our booty. It was sitting in the mud behind him. It was caked with dirt and weird, powdery rust. It looked like an old tractor crankcase.
“Is that it?” I said doubtfully.
“It looked better this morning,” Vlad said. “It was made of something like jade and was shaped like a vacuum cleaner. With fins. But if you take your eyes off it, it changes.”
“No. Really?”
Vlad said, “It’s looked shabby ever since you woke up. It’s picking up on your shame. That was really pretty horrible last night, Nikita; I’d never thought that you …”
I poked him sharply to shut him up. We looked at each other for a minute, and then I took a deep breath. “The main thing is that we’ve got it, Vlad. This is a great day in history.”
“Yeah,” Vlad agreed, finally smiling. The drive looked shinier now. “Help me rig up a sling for it.”
With great care, as much for our pounding heads as for the Artifact itself, we bundled it up in Vlad’s coat and slung it from a long, crooked shoulder-pole.
My head was still swimming. The mosquitoes were a nightmare. Vlad and I climbed up and over the splintery, denuded trunks of dead pines, stopping often to wheeze on the damp, metallic air. The sky was very clear and blue, the color of Lake Baikal. Sometimes, when Vlad’s head and shoulders were outlined against the sky, I seemed to see a faint Kirlian shimmer travelling up the shoulder-pole to dance on his skin.
Panting with exhaustion, we stopped and gulped down more rations. Both of us had the trots. Small wonder. We built a good sooty fire to keep the bugs off for a while. We threw in some smoky green boughs from those nasty-looking young pines. Vlad could not resist the urge to look at the Artifact again.
We unwrapped it. Vlad stared at it fondly. “After this, it will belong to all mankind,” he said. “But for now it’s ours!”
It had changed again. Now it had handles. They looked good and solid, less rusty than the rest. We lugged it by the handles until we got within earshot of the base-camp.
The soldiers heard our yells and three of them came to help us.
They told us about Nina on our way back. All day she had paced and fidgeted, worrying about Vlad and trying to talk the soldiers into a rescue mission. Finally, despite their good advice, she had set off after us alone.
The aurora fireworks during the night had terrified the Uzbeks. They were astonished to see that we had not only survived, but triumphed!
But we had to tell them that Nina was gone.
Sergeant Mukhamed produced some 200-proof ethanol from the de-icing tank of his byutor. Weeping un-ashamedly, we toasted the memory of our lost comrade, State Security Captain Nina Igorovna Bogulyubova. After that we had another round, and I made a short but dignified speech about those who fall while storming the cosmos. Yes, dear Captain Nina was gone; but thanks to her sacrifice, we, her comrades, had achieved an unprecedented victory. She would never be forgotten. Vlad and I would see to that.
We had another toast for our cosmic triumph. Then another for the final victory. Then we were out of drinks.
The Uzbeks hadn’t been idle while Vlad and I had been gone. They hadn’t been issued any live ammo, but a small bear had come snuffling around the camp the day before, and they’d managed to run over him with one of the byutors. The air reeked of roast bear meat and dripping fat. Vlad and I had a good big rack of ribs, each. The ribs in my chunk were pretty broken up, but it was still tasty. For the first time, I felt like a real hero. Eating bear meat in Siberia. It was a heck of a thing.
Now that we were back to the byutors, our problems were behind us and we could look forward to a real “rain of gold.” Medals, and plenty of them. Big dachas on the Black Sea, and maybe even lecture tours in the West, where we could buy jazz records. All the Red Army boys figured they had big promotions coming.
We broke camp and loaded the carriers. Vlad wouldn’t join the soldiers’ joking and kidding. He was still mooning about Nina. I felt sorry for Vlad. I’d never liked Nina much, and I’d been against her coming from the first. The wilderness was no place for females, and it was no wonder she’d come to grief. But I didn’t point this out to Vlad. It would only have made him feel worse. Besides, Nina’s heroic sacrifice had given a new level of deep moral meaning to our effort.
We packed the star-drive away in the first byutor where Vlad and I could keep an eye on it. Every time we stopped to refuel or study the maps, Vlad would open its wrappings, and have a peek. I teased him about it. “What’s the matter, comrade? Want to chain it to your leg?”
Vlad was running his hand over and over the drive’s rusty surface. Beneath his polishing strokes, a faint gleam of silver had appeared. He frowned mightily. “Nikita, we must never forget that this is no soulless machine. I’m convinced that it takes its form from what we make of it. It’s a frozen idea—that’s its true essence. And if you and I forget it, or look aside, it might just vanish.”
I tried to laugh him out of it, but Vlad was serious. He slept next to it both nights, until we reached the rail spur.
We followed the line to the station. Vlad telegraphed full particulars to Moscow and I sent along a proud report to Higher Circles.
We waited impatiently for four days. Finally a train arrived. It contained some rocket-drive technicians from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and two dozen uniformed KGB. Vlad and I were arrested. The Red Army boys were taken into custody by some Red Army brass. Even the Latvian who ran the station was arrested.
We were kept incommunicado in a bunk car. Vlad remained cheerful, though. “This is nothing,” he said, drawing on his old jailbird’s lore. “When they really mean business, they take your shoelaces. These KGB are just protective custody. After all, you and I have the greatest secret in cosmic history!” And we were treated well—we had red caviar, Crimean champagne, Kamchatkan king crab, blinis with sour cream.
The drive had been loaded aboard a flatcar and swathed down under many layers of canvas. The train pulled to a halt several times. The windowshades on our car were kept lowered, but whenever we stopped, Vlad peeked out. He claimed the rocket specialists were adjusting the load.
After the second day of travel I had grave doubts about our whole situation. No one had interrogated us; for cosmic heroes, we were being badly neglected. I even had to beg ignominiously for DDT to kill the crab-lice I had caught from Balan Thok. Compared to the mundane boredom of our train confinement, our glorious adventure began to seem absurd. How would we explain our strange decisions—how would we explain what had happened to Nina? Our confusion would surely make it look like we were hiding something.
Instead of returning in triumph to Kaliningrad, our train headed south. We were bound for Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the rockets were launched. Actually, Baikonur is just the “security name” for the installation. The real town of Baikonur is five hundred kilometers away. The true launch site is near the village of Tyuratam. And Tyuratam, worse luck, is even more of a hick town than Baikonur.
This cheerless place lies on a high plain north of Afghanistan and east of the Aral Sea. It was dry and hot when we got there, with a ceaseless irritating wind. As they marched us out of the train, we saw engineers unloading the drive. With derricks.
Over the course of the trip, as the government rocket experts fiddled with it, the drive had expanded to fit their preconceptions. It had grown to the size of a whole flat-car. It had become a maze of crooked hydraulics, with great ridged black blast-nozzles. It was even bound together with those ridiculous hoops.
Vlad and I were hustled
into our new quarters: a decontamination suite, built in anticipation of the launch of our first cosmonauts. It was not bad, for a jail. We probably would have gotten something worse, except that Vlad’s head sometimes oozed a faint but definite blue glow, and that made them cautious.
Our food came through sterilized slots in the wall. The door was like a bank vault. We were interrogated through windows of bulletproof glass via speakers and microphones.
We soon discovered that our space-drive had been classified at the Very Highest Circles. It was not to be publicly referred to as an alien artifact. Officially, our space-drive was a secret new design from Kaliningrad. Even the scientists working on it at Tyuratam had been told this, and apparently believed it.
The Higher Circles expected our drive to work miracles, but they were to be miracles of national Soviet science. No one was to know of our contact with cosmic powers.
Vlad and I became part of a precedence struggle in Higher Circles. Red Army defense radars had spotted the launching of the yurt, and they wanted to grill us. Khrushchev’s new Rocket Defense Forces also wanted us. So did the Kaliningrad KGB. And of course the Tyuratam technicians had a claim on us; they were planning to use our drive for a spectacular propaganda feat.
We ended up in the hands of KGB’s Paranormal Research Corps.
Weeks grew into months as the state psychics grilled us. They held up Zener cards from behind the glass and demanded that we guess circle, star, or cross. They gave us racks of radish seedlings through the food slots, and wanted us to speak nicely to half of them, and scold the other half.
They wanted us to influence the roll of dice, and to make it interesting they forced us to gamble for our vodka and cigarette rations. Naturally we blew the lot and were left with nothing to smoke.
We had no result from these investigations, except that Vlad once extruded a tiny bit of pale blue ectoplasm, and I turned out to be pretty good at reading colors, while blindfolded, with my fingertips. (I peeked down the side of my nose.)
One of our interrogators was a scrawny hard-line Stalinist named Yezhov. He’d been a student of the biologist Lysenko and was convinced that Vlad and I could turn wheat into barley by forced evolution. Vlad finally blew up at this. “You charlatans!” he screamed into the microphone. “Not one of you has even read Tsiolkovsky! How can I speak to you? Where is the Chief Designer? I demand to be taken to Comrade Sergei Korolyov! He’d understand this!”
“You won’t get out of it that way,” Yezhov yapped, angrily shaking his vial of wheat seeds. “Your Chief Designer has had a heart attack. He’s recovering in his dacha, and Khrushchev himself has ordered that he not be disturbed. Besides, do you think we’re stupid enough to let people with alien powers into the heart of Moscow?”
“So that’s it!” I shouted, wounded to the core at the thought of my beloved Moscow. “You pimp! We’ve been holding out on you, that’s all!” I jabbed my hand dramatically at him from behind the glass. “Tonight, while you’re sleeping, my psychic aura will creep into your bed and squeeze your brain, like this!” I made a fist. Yezhov fled in terror.
Silence fell. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Vlad observed.
I slumped into one of our futuristic aluminum chairs. “I couldn’t help it,” I muttered. “Vlad, the truth’s out. It’s permanent exile for us. We’ll never see Moscow again.” Tears filled my eyes.
Vlad patted my shoulder sympathetically. “It was a brave gesture, Nikita. I’m proud to call you my friend.”
“You’re the brave one, Vlad.”
“But without you at my side, Nikita … You know, I’d have never dared to go into that valley alone. And if you hadn’t drunk that piss first, well, I certainly would never have—”
“That’s all in the past now, Vlad.” My cheeks burned and I began sobbing. “I should have ignored you when you were sitting under that piano at Lyuda’s. I should have left you in peace with your beatnik friends. Vlad, can you ever forgive me?”
“It’s nothing,” Vlad said nobly, thumping my back. “We’ve all been used, even poor Chief Korolyov. They’ve worked him to a frazzle. Even in camp he used to complain about his heart.” Vlad shook his fist. “Those fools. We bring them a magnificent drive from Tunguska, and they convince themselves it’s a reaction engine from Kaliningrad.”
I burned with indignation. “That’s right. It was our discovery! We’re heroes, but they treat us like enemies of the State! It’s so unfair, so uncommunist!” My voice rose. “If we’re enemies of the State, then what are we doing in here? Real enemies of the State live in Paris, with silk suits and a girl on each arm! And plenty of capitalist dollars in a secret Swiss bank!”
Vlad was philosophical. “You can have all that. You know what I wanted? To see men on the moon. I just wanted to see men reach the moon, and know I’d seen a great leap for all humanity!”
I wiped away tears. “You’re a dreamer, Vlad. The Infinite is just a propaganda game. We’ll never see daylight again.”
“Don’t give up hope,” Vlad said stubbornly. “At least we’re not clearing trees in some labor camp where it’s forty below. Sooner or later, they’ll launch some cosmonauts, and then they’ll need this place for real. They’ll have to spring us then!”
We didn’t hear from the psychic corps again. We still got regular meals, and the occasional science magazine, reduced to tatters by some idiot censor who had decided that Vlad and I were security risks. Once we even got a charity package from, of all people, Lyuda, who sent Vlad two cartons of Kents. We made a little ceremony of smoking one, every day.
Our glass decontamination booth fronted on an empty auditorium for journalists and debriefing teams. Too bad none of them ever showed up. Every third day, three cleaning women with mops and buckets scoured the auditorium floor. They always ignored us. Vlad and I used to speculate feverishly about their underwear.
The psychics had given up, and no one else seemed interested. Somehow we’d been lost in the files. We had been covered up so thoroughly that we no longer existed. We were the ghosts’ ghosts, and the secrets’ secrets, the best-hidden people in the world. We seemed to have popped loose from time and space, sleeping later and later each day, until finally we lost a day completely and could never keep track again.
We were down to our last pack of Kents when we had an unexpected visit.
It was a Red Army general with two brass-hat flunkies. We spotted him coming down the aisles from the auditorium’s big double-doors, and we hustled on our best shirts. The general was a harried-looking, bald guy in his fifties. He turned on our speakers and looked down at his clipboard.
“Comrades Zipkin and Globov!”
“Let me handle this, Vlad,” I hissed quickly. I leaned into my mike. “Yes, Comrade General?”
“My name’s Nedelin. I’m in charge of the launch.”
“What launch?” Vlad blurted.
“The Mars probe, of course.” Nedelin frowned. “According to this, you were involved in the engine’s design and construction?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “Thoroughly.”
Nedelin turned a page. “A special project with the Chief Designer.” He spoke with respect. “I’m no scientist, and I know you have important work in there. But could you spare time from your labors to lend us a hand? We could use your expertise.”
Vlad began to babble. “Oh, let us watch the launch! You can shoot us later, if you want! But let us see it, for God’s sake—”
Luckily I had clamped my hand over Vlad’s mike. I spoke quickly. “We’re at your service, General. Never mind Professor Zipkin, he’s a bit distraught.”
One of the flunkies wheeled open our bank-vault door. His nose wrinkled at the sudden reek of months of our airtight stench, but he said nothing. Vlad and I accompanied Nedelin through the building. I could barely hold back from skipping and leaping, and Vlad’s knees trembled so badly I was afraid he would faint.
“I wouldn’t have disturbed your secret project,” the general infor
med us, “but Comrade Khrushchev delivers a speech at the United Nations tomorrow. He plans to announce that the Soviet Union has launched a probe to Mars. This launch must succeed today at all costs.” We walked through steel double-doors into the Tyuratam sunshine. Dust and grass had never smelled so good.
We climbed into Nedelin’s open-top field car. “You understand the stakes involved,” Nedelin said, sweating despite the crisp October breeze. “There is a new American president, this Cuban situation … our success is crucial!”
We drove off rapidly across the bleak concrete expanse of the rocket-field. Nedelin shouted at us from the front seat. “Intelligence says the Americans are redoubling their space efforts. We must do something unprecedented, something to crush their morale! Something years ahead of its time! The first spacecraft sent to another planet!”
Wind poured through our long hair, our patchy beards. “A new American president,” Vlad muttered. “Big deal.” As I soaked my lungs with fresh air I realized how much Vlad and I stank. We looked and smelled like derelicts. Nedelin was obviously desperate.
We pulled up outside the sloped, fire-scorched wall of a concrete launch bunker. The Mars rocket towered on its pad, surrounded by four twenty-story hinged gantries. Wisps of cloud poured down from the rocket’s liquid-oxygen ports. Dozens of technicians in white coats and hard-hats clambered on the skeletal gantry-ladders, or shouted through bullhorns around the rocket’s huge base.
“Well, comrades?” Nedelin said. “As you can see, we have our best people at it. The countdown went smoothly. We called for ignition. And nothing. Nothing at all!” He pulled off his brimmed cap and wiped his balding scalp. “We have a very narrow launch window! Within a matter of hours we will have lost our best parameters. Not to mention Comrade Khrushchev’s speech!”
Vlad sniffed the air. “Comrade General. Have you fueled this craft with liquid paraffin?”
“Naturally!”
Vlad’s voice sank. “These people are working on a rocket which misfired. And you haven’t drained the fuel?”
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