The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  II. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, SEPTEMBER 1957

  Awakened by the commingled howls of all the souls in Hell, a startled Evgeny Aksyonov lifted the curtain of this compartment window and looked out onto a circus. Loping alongside the train was a parallel train of camels, a dozen or more of the gangling beasts, their fencepost teeth bared as they yelped and brayed and groaned, lips curled in great ropy sneers. Bulging gray sacks jogged at their flanks, and swaying atop each mount was a swarthy, bearded rider in flowing robes, with a snarl to rival that of his camel.

  So this is Kazakhstan, thought Aksyonov, who before this trip never had been farther east than the outskirts of Moscow, the home of a maiden aunt who baked fine tarts. He breathed the choking dust and coughed with enthusiasm; he was too young to be uncomfortable. One of the camel drivers noticed him gawking, grinned, and raised a shaggy fist in a gesture so rude that Aksyonov hastily dropped the curtain and sat back, fingering his own suddenly inadequate beard. He rummaged in his canvas bag for the worn copy of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, which he opened at random and began to read, though he could have recited the passage with his eyes closed. He soon nodded off again, and in his dreams he was a magnificent bronze fighter of the desert, who brandished a scimitar to defy the rockets that split the sky.

  No conductor, no fellow passenger disturbed his sleep, for Evgeny Aksyonov was bound for a place that did not officially exist, to meet a man who officially had no name. Access to such non-places and non-people was strictly regulated, and so Aksyonov was the only passenger aboard the train.

  “Come,” the soldier on the platform said, after he peered from Aksyonov’s face to his photo and back again just enough to make Aksyonov nervous. “The Chief Designer expects you.”

  For fifteen minutes or more, he drove Aksyonov along a freshly paved highway so wide and straight it seemed inevitable, past a series of construction sites where the hollow outlines of immense buildings rose from pits and heaps of dirt. Gangs of workers swarmed about. Atop one pile of earth, three armed soldiers kept watch: the men swinging picks below must be zeks, political prisoners, the Motherland’s most menial laborers. A gleaming rail spur crossed and recrossed the road, and Aksyonov began to brace himself for each intersection, because the driver did not slow down. Some completed buildings looked like administrative offices, others like army barracks. Behind one barracks were more inviting dwellings, a half-dozen yurts. A couple of Kazakh men were in the process of rolling a seventh into place, as if it were a great hide-covered hoop.

  The driver abandoned Askyonov without speech or ceremony at the concrete lip of a kilometer-wide pit. Aksyonov looked down sixty meters along the steep causeway that would channel the rocket blasts. He shivered and retreated from the edge of the launch pad, a tremendous concrete shelf hundreds of meters square. No amount of rocket research would make him fond of heights. Above him soared three empty gantries, thirty-meter talons that would close on the rocket and hold it fast until liftoff.

  Hundreds of workers dashed about the pad. Some drove small electric carts, some clambered along scaffolds that reached into the tips of the gantries and the depths of the pit. Among them were many Kazakh men, distinguishable even at a distance by their felt skullcaps. Amid all this activity, Aksyonov tried to look as knowledgeable and useful as possible while he guarded his luggage and felt homesick.

  As he considered getting out his book, he was jolted nearly off his feet by a voice that boomed and echoed from everywhere: to left, to right, the pit, the sky.

  “Testing. Testing. One two three. Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky.”

  Then came several prolonged and deafening blasts, like gusts into a microphone. Aksyonov clapped his hands over his ears. No one else in the whole anthill took any visible notice of the racket.

  “Hello. Hello. Hello.” The words rolled across the concrete in waves and rattled Aksyonov to the bone. “Can you hear me? Eh? Hello? I’m asking you – you there with the beard. Yes, you, the one doing no work. Can you hear me?”

  Aksyonov released his ears and looked about the launch pad. Unsure where to direct his response, he waved both hands high above his head.

  “Good,” the voice said. “Wait there. I’ll be right up – ” The next words were swallowed in a spasm of rattling coughs that echoed off the sides of the pit and seemed to well up from the earth itself. Aksyonov covered his ears again. In mid-cough, the amplification stopped, and all that fearsome reverberation contracted to a single small voice that hacked and cleared its throat far across the concrete pad.

  Aksyonov turned to see a man step out of an elevator set into one of the support pillars. The man walked toward Aksyonov, swabbed his mouth with a handkerchief: heavy-set, fiftyish, with low, thick eyebrows and a brilliant gaze. He wore an overcoat, though the day was warm for autumn.

  “You are Aksyonov,” he said, hand extended. He said it as if he had reviewed a list of names in the elevator, and had selected just the right one for the job; if he had said Dyomin or Pilyugin or Molotov, Aksyonov would have answered to it just as readily, then and forever. “My name is Sergei Korolev,” the older man continued, “but you are unlikely to hear that name again. Here I am only the Chief Designer, or the Chief. Welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome.”

  Aksyonov made a little bow, just more than a nod. He had rehearsed his opening and was quite proud of it. “I am honored to meet the man who designed the first Soviet rocket.”

  “And I am honored to meet the designer of our future ones,” Korolev replied. “In collaboration, of course. Space is a collaborative effort, like a nation, or a cathedral. Come with me, please,” he added over his shoulder, for he already was well on his way across the pad. Aksyonov grabbed his bags and scrambled to catch up.

  “I regret that I have no time to give you a tour of the facility, nor a proper interview. Can you recognize a lie when you hear one? What I just told you was a lie. Truthfully, I do not regret it at all, for I am glad finally to be busy with this launch of the Fellow Traveler – you read the brief I sent you, yes? Yes. Instead of the usual formalities, you will accompany me on all my rounds in the coming week, from this moment. Will this be satisfactory?”

  “Very much so, Comrade Korolev. Er, Comrade Chief.”

  “Simply Chief will do. Hello, Abish, you mad Kazakh, please keep it out of the pit, will you?” he cried to a waving, grinning man who whizzed past in an electric cart. “You come from the Academy with the highest recommendations, Comrade Aksyonov. So high that you actually had a choice of postings, and choice is a rare thing in this new century. Tell me, why did you choose Baikonur? Do you nurse some abiding love for sand?”

  “Primarily, Comrade – er, Chief – I came here to work with you.” He awaited some response, got none, and went on. “Also, Comrade Shandarin’s design group involves – well, let us say much more conventional applications of rocketry? Your work at Baikonur, what little I could learn of it, seemed much more interesting.”

  “I understand,” the Chief said. He led the way down a metal spiral staircase that clamored at every step. “Comrade Shandarin is like the old Chinaman, who lobs arrows of flying fire at the Mongols. The firepower is greater and greater, but still the Mongols keep coming.” At the foot of the reverberating stairs, he turned back and stared at Aksyonov’s luggage. “What in the hell are all these things you carry around with you?”

  Aksyonov stopped. “Ah, just some . . . just my luggage, Chief.” The older man’s gaze was unreadable. “My clothes, and books . . . and some personal items . . .” He faltered.

  After some thought, the Chief grunted in mingled assent and surprise and said, “Books are useful.” Turning to the parking lot, he swept one arm back toward the launch pad. “Consider this a personal item, too.”

  As the two men approached, a large soldier bounded from a car, threw open the back door, and stood at attention. In one hand he held a book, his place marked with an index finger.

  “Thank you, Oleg,” the Chief said, and followed A
ksyonov in. “Oleg here is reading his way through all the major published works on rocketry and interplanetary travel. What do you think of the Goddard, Oleg?”

  “Very interesting, Chief,” the soldier said, as he cranked the ignition. Aksyonov studied the man’s thick, shaven neck.

  “It is a directed reading,” the Chief continued. He pulled a slide rule and a slim notebook from his coat. The shadows of the gantries swept across his face as the car circled the parking lot. “If I must live with an armed escort, I will at least be able to converse civilly with him.”

  “Would you like to converse now, Chief?” the driver asked.

  “No, thank you,” said the Chief. His fingers danced across the numbers as Aksyonov looked out the back window at the receding claws of the pad.

  III. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 4 OCTOBER 1957

  “Ten.”

  Ten seconds to go, and no work left to be done. Wonderful, wonderful. Korolev stretched out his legs beneath the scarred wooden desk, pulled the microphone forward, and relaxed as he counted down to zero.

  “Nine.”

  A hundred meters away from this steel-encased concrete bunker, Korolev’s voice must be booming across the launch pad. Only the topmost fifteen meters of Old Number Seven would be visible above the icy white fog vented from its liquid-oxygen tanks. Korolev had watched it through every periscope, from every angle, until his cheeks ached from squinting. Now he attempted to watch nothing. His subordinates glanced up from their consoles and radar screens sweaty and white-lipped, like men ridden by nightmares. Let them worry. It was part of the learning experience. Korolev was done with worries – for eight more seconds, anyway. Then the next trial would begin, but in the meantime he would savor his triumph like a crust of bread.

  “Eight.”

  Just weeks before, Comrade Khrushchev had given the go-ahead for an orbital satellite launch – a launch that would impress the world (so he said) with the fearsome might of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Ha! As if Washington were as easy to reach as orbit. The Party Chairman had played right into the Chief Designer’s hands.

  “Seven.”

  Granted, Old Number Seven was a remarkable design achievement. Twelve small steering rockets and four strap-on boosters surrounded a central core with twenty separate thrust chambers. The metallurgists, wringing their hands, had told Korolev that his project was doomed, that any single rocket of Soviet make would shatter well before it reached four hundred and fifty thousand kilograms of thrust. Very well, Korolev said: How about two dozen, three dozen smaller rockets clustered together? The union is greater than the individual; was this not the essence of Communism?

  “Six.”

  For hours, Khrushchev and the members of the Politburo, who knew as much about rocketry as any equivalent number of camels, had scampered about the launch pad like Siberian peasants on the loose in Red Square. They wanted to touch everything, like children; Korolev had to be stern with them. And they asked childish questions: How much does it weigh? How fast does it go? How high will it fly? The answers made them even more excited, and Khrushchev was the most excited of all. “This is a great work you do, Comrade Korolev!” he kept saying. The man’s cigar ashes were everywhere, and Korolev had not seen his favorite tea glass since.

  “Five.”

  Comrade Shandarin’s objections, though they went unheeded at the Kremlin, were sound. What good was an ICBM that took hours to fuel and launch? One so large that it could be moved only by railway? One that could not maneuver itself to its target, but had to be guided by human controllers on the ground? Worst of all, from Shandarin’s standpoint, only the northeastern corner of the United States had anything to fear from Old Number Seven. “Comrade,” he intoned, “there are precious few military targets in Maine.” The restless old Chinaman could hear the Mongols laughing.

  “Four.”

  Just a week before, young Aksyonov, at the close of a routine meeting, had loitered about with the constipated expression that signified an important question welling up inside. “Chief, I am confused,” the young man said. “The field marshal keeps referring to Old Number Seven as a ballistic missile. Perhaps I am wrong, Chief, but – is Old Number Seven not a rather inefficient design for a ballistic missile?”

  “Three.”

  Korolev had beamed at the young man, leaned forward and said, “I do not think that a fair assessment, Comrade Aksyonov. I think it would be more accurate to call Old Number Seven a shitty design for a ballistic missile.”

  “Two.”

  “But,” Korolev continued, “it will make a marvelous booster rocket to send men into space.”

  “One.

  “Ignition!”

  And so a new star blossomed in the Central Asian desert and rose into the heavens, and even over the thunderous roar of the rockets the others in the command bunker heard the Chief as he threw his head back and laughed.

  IV. STEPPES NORTH OF BAIKONUR, FEBRUARY 1961

  Aksyonov stood beside the Chief, their elbows touching, twin binoculars raised. An eagle wheeled across Aksyonov’s portion of sky, and he instinctively turned his head to keep it in view, then caught himself and swung back to focus on the orange parachute as it grew larger and larger – though not quite so large as expected.

  Aksyonov lowered his binoculars and checked his map, but the Chief needed no confirmation. “Our peacock has flown off course,” he muttered, and rapped twice on the roof of the cab.

  The truck roared forward, jolted along the frozen ruts of the dirt lane, and the swaying engineers in the back held on as best they could. Across the vast fields to right and left, toy-sized trucks and ambulances raced alongside. A flock of far-distant sheep surged away from an oncoming truck; the wind carried the honks and bleats for kilometers. Streams of vehicles converged on the drifting orange blossom that was Pyotr Dolgov.

  The Chief was on good terms with each of the prospective cosmonauts at Star City, knew their names and families and hobbies and histories, knew in fact everything in their dossiers (and KGB dossiers omitted nothing). The Chief had selected these men from thousands of candidates, in consultation with Khrushchev and, seemingly, half the Politburo; and despite all this, Aksyonov was convinced that the Chief never liked Pyotr Dolgov.

  The cosmonaut would sit in the commons for hours waxing his absurd mustache and bragging to everyone about his sexual exploits and his skydiving expertise. “More than five hundred jumps, my friends, and not so much as a sprained ankle. You see this little pocket volume of Lenin? I collect them, just to have something to read on the way down. After the chute is open, there is nothing else to do, you see? Eventually I will have read all the great man’s works between earth and sky! How many scholars can say as much?” And so on and so on, as the other cosmonauts hooted and jeered throughout. The Chief, shambling through the commons with a fresh sheaf of problems under his arm, would glare at him, and say nothing.

  Yet Dolgov was the obvious man to test the East’s ejection system, and such a test must be done without delay, if what the Chief read in the KGB reports, and in Life magazine, were to be believed. Woe indeed, that long, dry, cold spring, if the Chief caught someone taking a break to smoke a cigarette or place an idle telephone call or, worst of all, take a nap. “Do the Americans and the Germans shirk their jobs, down there in the tropics?” he would yell, waving the latest publicity photographs of the seven toothy spacemen. (The Americans surely would send the first dentist into space.) The Chief found this strange, perpetually sunny launch site, this Cape Canaveral Florida, a locale as exotic as Mars or the moon; to him it was always “down there in the tropics.” So Dolgov was hustled through his training, and the final test was scheduled for late February.

  The experiment was simple. Dolgov, suited up, was strapped into a prototype ejection seat inside a full-size mock-up of the East craft. Then the mock-up was carried aloft in the cargo bay of one of the big Antonov transports. Thousands of meters above the steppes, the capsule was shoved without
ceremony out the back of the plane. Once clear, Dolgov pressed the “eject” button. Very simple. Also lunatic, but the schedule at Baikonur Cosmodrome made generous allowances for lunacy.

  Dolgov had summed up the procedure: “You feed me to the plane, and the plane shits me back out!”

  The Chief had winced, and then nodded his head.

  The Chief’s truck was not the first to arrive that afternoon. A gaggle of engineers all tried to climb over the tailgate together, and the Chief, impatient, gestured for Aksyonov to help him over the side. The rippling parachute danced sideways, but was anchored by the prone figure on the ground.

  A pale soldier with a rifle jogged up to the Chief and said: “It’s bad, Comrade Designer. Perhaps you should wait for the – ” The Chief, of course, was already past, and Aksyonov checked his stride a bit so as not to outpace the Chief.

  Dolgov lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled as no living man would willingly lie. His helmet, its faceplate shattered, rested at a crazy angle on his shoulders yet still was bolted to the suit.

  The Chief stared down at the body and said, “We are fools before men and before God.”

  Doctors arrived, circling somewhat to maintain a respectful distance from the Chief, and confirmed the obvious: Dolgov’s neck was broken. He had done no reading on the way down.

  “His helmet must have struck the hatch upon ejection,” Aksyonov said, for he felt he should say something. “He knew the risks,” he added.

  “Not as well as you, my friend, and certainly not as well as I.” The Chief’s voice was deceptively quiet. By now dozens of others had gathered. They looked sick, ashen, aghast, but the Chief’s face was taut with fury. Slow and gentle in his rage, he knelt on the frozen ground, reached past the doctors, grasped Dolgov’s outflung hands, and folded the arms across the orange chest so that Dolgov seemed to grasp the chest straps of his parachute.