Now they all found voices.
“He has performed dozens of these operations.”
“His technique is flawless, Comrade Minister, you should see him at work.”
“He has not been so . . . burdened with administrative duties in recent years as you, Comrade Minister.” That was Remek, the toad.
“And surely the welfare of this patient, so vital to the interests of the Revolution, warrants the collaboration of all the finest doctors on the staff.”
The Health Minister smiled and raised a hand. “I thank you all for your counsel. It has been duly noted, and will not be forgotten. I cannot detail my reasons for not calling upon Dr. Vishnevskiy – for much of the material that crosses my desk, as you know, is classified – but suffice to say that security issues were among my considerations. Besides. My understanding is that young Dr. Vishnevskiy’s surgical technique, however flashy and attention-getting, may be somewhat impaired after the dinner hour. Thank you all again for your concern. After you . . . comrades.”
The team trudged into the scrub room like a detail of zeks. All avoided the Health Minister’s gaze except for that one nurse, whose glance was not only contemptuous but dismissive. Fighting his anger, the Minister took a deep breath and consoled himself with the thought that the upstart Vishnevskiy would share none of the credit for this service to the Revolution. No, this personal friend of Brezhnev, this most laudable Communist, would receive a most singular honor. His operation would be personally performed by a full, sitting member of the Politburo. The Health Minister pushed forward, and behind him the swinging doors repeatedly clapped.
The sirens grew louder as Vishnevskiy and his friend the music critic, the last to leave as usual, bantered outside the opera.
“No, no, you will go before I do, my friend,” the music critic said. “The moon will need surgeons long before symphonies, and a critic? If we know what’s good for us, we critics will all stay down here, where there’s so much more to criticize.”
Vishnevskiy guffawed and clapped his friend on the back. “Well said, well said, but surely musicians, writers, artists of every stripe should be among the first to walk the lunar landscape. Who better to relay its wonders to the rest of us? The job must not be left to the television cameras, of that I’m sure. The mind reels at the thought.”
“We have visitors,” said the music critic, suddenly grave.
Roaring up the circular drive were four police motorcycles, sirens wailing. They wheeled to a halt in the gray slush at the foot of the grand staircase. “Dr. Vishnevskiy?” one of the officers called.
“Yes,” he stated. His shoulder ached beneath the clamp of his friend’s hand, but he was nonetheless grateful for it.
“You are urgently needed in the operating room, Comrade Doctor. We are here to escort you.”
The music critic slumped in relief, and Vishnevskiy exhaled a roiling cloud of breath.
“I thank you, Comrades,” he said. “I am ready to go.”
Poor Remek, talking so fast he practically stuttered, briefed him through the intercom as he lathered his arms. Vishnevskiy wasted no time asking questions, enough time had been wasted already, but he wondered: How the hell had intestinal cancer been mistaken for hemorrhoids? And why hadn’t they halted the procedure, called for help and more equipment, instead of hacking around in him for hours? Then Remek started babbling about the importance to the State of the poor soul on the table, and Vishnevskiy had his answer.
“The Minister,” he snarled.
The damned fool didn’t even have the nerve to look up as Vishnevskiy ran into the operating room, though all other heads turned. His run to the table became a trot, then a walk, as he looked at the Health Minister, who moaned softly as he worked, and at the others, bloody hands at their sides. Vishnevskiy looked at the patient, closed his eyes, and controlled himself before he opened them again. He reached up and ripped off the mask.
“I do not operate on dead men,” he said.
Outside, alone and glad of the cold, Vishnevskiy looked up and thought, ah moon, what do you know of slaughter, and pride, and folly? Better we should stay where we are.
X. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, FEBRUARY 1966
At first, Aksyonov pretended he didn’t hear the knocking. He figured it was only Shandarin again, with a freshly typed sheet of demands. Shandarin liked to deliver his memos in person so that he could watch his team leaders read them, gauge their reactions, and satisfy himself that his wishes were clear. They were clear to Aksyonov even before the first memo, clear at least from the afternoon of the Chief’s funeral, when Shandarin had left the Kremlin wall in Brezhnev’s limousine.
The Chief’s plan for tanker craft carried into orbit by Old Number Seven had been scrapped. Not spectacular enough, not decisive enough, for Shandarin (and not, presumably, for Brezhnev either). Instead, Shandarin’s own giant Proton, designed to carry hundred-megaton warheads, would blast cosmonauts into a loop around the moon in October 1967; the Proton’s as-yet theoretical descendant, Shandarin’s cherished G-1, would launch the redesigned Union spacecraft toward a moon landing the following year. As for the Chief’s meticulous series of incremental test flights to check out the new Union’s capabilities one at a time, Shandarin had crossed out most of them, so that a totally revamped craft could be shot into orbit in a year – or less.
When Aksyonov first realized the enormity of what the Chief’s successor intended to do, he was too dumbfounded even to be angry. Instead he laughed. Chuckling, Aksyonov spun the dossier down the conference table, so that pages whirled out of the folder like petals, and said, “Impossible.”
The folder stopped in front of Shandarin, who sat at the far end of the long table, in what he had wrongly assumed was the chief’s chair. (The Chief had paced during meetings, never sat anywhere, and where the others sat, or whether they sat at all, had never been among his concerns.) “Impossible?” Shandarin snorted. “What nonsense. Have you forgotten, Comrade? Artificial satellites are impossible. A manned spacecraft in orbit is impossible. We have done the impossible for years, Comrade Aksyonov. Now we will do it faster and more efficiently, that’s all.”
Aksyonov drew from his wallet a clipping from the January 16 edition of Truth. Already two such clippings had fallen to pieces in his hands from repeated unfolding and reading and folding again; fortunately, old Truths were not hard to find, even at Baikonur. “You read this tribute to the Chief upon his death, did you not, Comrade Shandarin?”
“Of course I read it. You wave it at me every three days; how could I fail to have read it?”
“To my knowledge,” Aksyonov continued, “this was the first time the Chief’s name ever appeared in print. Think of that. For twenty, no, thirty years he was the guiding genius of the Soviet space program – even before the government knew it had a space program. Yet how many Soviets knew his name? How many of the disciples who worked beside him every day knew his name? How many of the cosmonauts who entrusted their lives to him knew his name? And did the Chief care? Did he mind that he was a man without a name?”
“What is your point, Aksyonov? I have work to do today, if you do not.”
“I am making no point, Comrade Shandarin. You are the man who makes points – very clear and unequivocal points. No, I just wonder whether your goal is to put a man on the face of the moon, or to put your name on the front page of Truth, and how many of us nameless men you will sacrifice to get it there.”
Shandarin stood, smiled, gathered his papers, and slowly walked the length of the table. He patted Aksyonov on the shoulder, leaned forward until their noses practically touched, and said in a warm and fatherly voice, “Not so very many years ago, I commanded a far more efficient operation, where I occasionally had my workers shot for insolence.”
“How strange, then, that you didn’t shoot the Chief when you had the chance,” Aksyonov replied, “since he always knew you to be a tyrant and a fool. I am surprised you were not strong enough to bury his body in the snow of t
he gulag, and lead us all into space on your own.”
And so Aksyonov felt no real reason to answer the door. He just sat on the swaybacked couch, read the clipping again, and let the man knock. Knock, knock! Yet this didn’t sound like Shandarin’s impatient rap, nor the idiot pounding of the KGB. This was the gentle, incessant knock of someone who would stand there on the porch of the cottage until doomsday, secure in the faith that his knocking was not in vain. Growling, Aksyonov kicked through the litter of dirty clothes (what was the point of laundry now?) and flung open the door.
A woman.
A wide, heavy-set, attractive woman of about fifty, graying hair tied behind in a youthful braid. Large nose and deep brown eyes. She cradled in her arms a bulky cardboard box bound with masking tape. Behind her, at the foot of the drive, Oleg stood at attention beside the car.
Aksyonov blinked at both of them in wonderment.
“Comrade Aksyonov? I apologize for disturbing you so late, but I must return to Moscow tonight. I am Nina Ivanovna Korolev. Sergei Pavlovich’s wife. The Chief’s wife.”
“His wife!” Aksyonov exclaimed.
She stooped and set the box onto the porch at his feet. Straightening, she smiled a thin, sad smile. “You need not struggle to conceal your astonishment, Comrade. I know that my husband never spoke of me here. Far safer, he said, to keep his family as secret as possible.”
“His family!” Next the sun and the moon would wrestle for dominion of the sky.
“I am sure I know much more about you than you about me, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband spoke of you whenever he came to Moscow. He said he had more faith in you than in any rocket he had ever designed.” She nodded at the box and said, “These are a few of his personal effects. I am sure he would have wanted you to have them.”
“Personal effects,” Aksyonov said, slumped against the doorway. He felt increasingly redundant in this conversation. “Please, forgive my manners, Nina Ivanovna. Won’t you come inside, out of the cold? Oleg, you come, too. Please, I will brew some tea – ”
She shook her head. “I am sorry, but I must go. The helicopter waits. Goodbye, Comrade Aksyonov. Thank you for your help to my husband.” She moved with remarkable grace for a large woman, and was halfway down the steps before he could react.
“Wait!” he cried.
She did, though she did not look around. She faced the frozen yard, and trembled.
“Please, I don’t understand. There’s so much I want to ask you, about your family, and about the Chief – I mean, about Sergei Pavlovich. He was such a tremendous influence on me, you see, on so many of us, and I know so little about him. So little. Next to nothing, really. And I could tell you things. I could tell you what he was like here, what he used to do and say, how the cosmonauts all venerated him, you have no idea. You should know all this. Come inside, please. We have so much to talk about – ”
“We have nothing to talk about,” she said as she faced him. “Don’t you see? Can’t you imagine how difficult it was for me to come here? To see this place that destroyed my husband – that destroyed me? Year after year after year, Comrade Aksyonov, about once a month, with no warning whatsoever, my telephone would ring, and I would answer it immediately, for our apartment is small and I sleep but lightly, and then I would go downstairs and watch my husband climb out of a car full of soldiers – so slowly, oh, so slowly he moved, like an old, old man – I never saw him when he wasn’t exhausted. He and I would sit at the foot of the stairs and talk for an hour or more, until he had gathered the strength to climb to the bedroom and go to sleep. And the next morning the car full of soldiers would still be out there, and it would take him away again. Back to this place. Back to all of you. Do you understand, Comrade Aksyonov, why do I not rush to embrace you now?” She walked a few paces into the yard, then added: “When my husband was sent to Siberia, so many years ago, I was like a madwoman. I thought he was lost to me, that he would be in prison for the rest of his life. And I was right, Comrade, I was right.”
“Your husband was a free man,” Aksyonov said.
“I have no control over what you believe,” Nina Ivanovna said. She nodded toward the package on the porch. “I have given you all that I can give you. And now I must go home.”
She walked to the car, where Oleg held open the passenger door. Just before she stepped inside, she called out, “Try to get some sleep, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband always worried because you worked so late.”
Aksyonov knelt beside the package, rubbed his hands across the smooth surfaces of tape, looking for a seam, as the car sputtered to life and Oleg and Nina Ivanovna drove away. He never saw either of them again.
XI. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 24 APRIL 1967
Aksyonov would not have thought it possible: Somehow the two soldiers who flanked the control-room door, already as erect and expressionless as twin gantries, managed to snap to attention as the prime minister walked in. Every controller, engineer, and technician in the room stood as well, though they had not been trained in it and were far less impressive than the soldiers.
The prime minister wore a well-tailored black suit that looked nondescript beside the uniform of his escort, General Zeldovich, who was splendid in medals and buttons and epaulets. The prime minister nodded at everyone and patted the air. With a collective exhalation, everyone sat and returned to their tasks, except for Aksyonov and Shandarin, who joined the dignitaries in the back of the room.
Aksyonov was aware of the sweaty moons beneath his own arms, of the hair he had neither washed nor combed in more than a day, and he cursed himself for such thoughts. What must poor Novikov look like at this moment? Novikov, who had cooked him besh barmak; Novikov, who had told him it was no dishonor to be sick in space; Novikov now was in an orbital hell, somersaulting in vomit and terror.
“This is a great honor, Comrade Prime Minister,” Shandarin said, and shook his hand a bit too vigorously. “Your historic contribution to this mission will do wonders for Comrade Novikov’s performance.”
“Whatever I can do to help, Comrade,” the prime minister said, and gently freed his hand. He surveyed the descending tiers of desks and instrument panels; the vast display screens on the far wall, the litter of sandwich wrappers and tea glasses underfoot, the samovar in the corner. His nose wrinkled slightly: The sweat of unwashed men, Aksyonov wondered, or the far worse stink of desperation? “Please show me to my microphone, and tell me the current situation,” the prime minister said. “In layman’s terms, mind you.”
Shandarin rolled his own plush chair back over Aksyonov’s toes and gestured for the prime minister to sit. He had cleared his work station of everything but a microphone and a small gold-plated bust of Lenin, which the prime minister pushed aside to open his leather briefcase. Shandarin glanced at Aksyonov, who recited on cue:
“Comrade Novikov is in his eighteenth orbit of the Earth. Because of a failed solar panel, his craft is critically low on electrical power, so that most of its automatic systems are inoperable. He has attempted for some time to manually orient the craft for re-entry, thus far without success. Even now we are talking him through the process.”
The prime minister had opened a manila file folder containing many closely typed pages. Aksyonov edged closer, tried to read over the prime minister’s shoulder. “About an hour ago,” Aksyonov continued, “Novikov spoke to his wife on the radio. Understandably, she was quite upset.”
The prime minister glanced around at the general, his papers poised. “The woman we passed in the corridor?”
The general nodded.
“I assumed she was one of the female cosmonauts,” the prime minister said.
The general looked uncomfortable and said, “No, Comrade.” All the other women cosmonauts-in-training had, of course, been sent home after Valentina Tereshkova landed safely four years earlier. Tereshkova herself had been sent on a worldwide lecture tour, her three-day space career at an end.
“Good,” the prime minister said. “I had wondered at such
a womanly outburst from a trained pilot.” The general tugged at his white mustache as if to say yes, yes, just so. “Proceed, Comrade.”
“One more thing, Comrade Prime Minister,” Aksyonov continued. “The craft’s shortwave radio failed very early in the flight. We have been using the craft’s ultra-shortwave backup radio, but because electrical power is in such short supply, even that is beginning to fade. Much of your message to the cosmonaut, in short, may be lost in static and garble.”
The prime minister smiled for the first time. “You may know quite a lot about spaceflight, Comrade,” he said, “but I know a good bit about speeches. And I assure you, the individual sentences are never as important as the cumulative whole – as Comrade Castro has demonstrated, eh, Comrade General?” He and the general chuckled, and Shandarin, after a pause, joined them. Aksyonov did not. He was scanning the text of the prime minister’s welcome-home address to honor Jakov Novikov, in which each reference to the cosmonaut as “he” and “his” had been amended, in a neat and precise hand, to “you” and “your.” Then the prime minister laid his hand across the sheet.
“Do you have any questions, Comrade Prime Minister?” Shandarin asked.
“Just one,” the prime minister said, looking at Aksyonov. “Does Novikov’s wife have reason to weep?”
Shandarin opened his mouth to reply, but Aksyonov was quicker. He said: “The Union One is out of control.”
The prime minister, the general, Shandarin, all regarded him. The whole room was hushed by this heresy, though none but the nearest tier of controllers could have overheard.
Several tiers below, one man read aloud a list of numbers for another man to double-check. The numbers were long, with many decimal places, and their progress was slow. “Let’s just start over,” one of the men said.
“I see,” the prime minister said, as he rubbed his eyes. He swiveled to face forward, squared the edges of his speech, and said, “I am ready, Comrade.”
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