The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  While he dialled the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

  After he had spoken to the police he turned off the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

  When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbonlike balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled a chair over to a side window, sat back, and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

  Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

  Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the lines of exhibits. Half-asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do through the coming months, of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island galaxies, vanished forever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

  The Astronaut

  VALENTINA ZHURAVLYOVA

  Translated by James Womack

  Valentina Nikolayevna Zhuravlyova (1933–2004) was a Soviet-era science fiction writer from Russia. She published a handful of stories in English in the 1980s that were originally written in the 1950s and early 1960s, but she is largely unknown to Western readers. Especially during the 1960s, the Soviet Union boasted several talented Russian and Ukrainian writers besides the iconic Strugatsky brothers, although the Strugatskys were arguably the only ones to break out into significant English translation.

  Although little is known about Zhuravlyova, she did collaborate on science fiction with her husband, the engineer and inventor Genrich Altshuller, who invented TRIZ—the Russian acronym for the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. They wrote many stories together, but because of anti-Semitic restrictions, these stories were published under the single name of Valentina Zhuravlyova. (“The Astronaut,” however, is a story Valentina wrote solo.)

  As noted by James Lecky in a 2013 blog entry, “The Astronaut” was first published in 1960 but later appeared in the 1963 anthology Destination: Amaltheia, edited by Richard Dixon. The story is striking for its mixture of big, bold emotions and themes of sacrifice and renewal. As Lecky also notes, despite the emotional openness of the story, its provocative structure marks it as a forerunner of the New Wave of the mid-1960s. This new translation by James Womack corrects several errors in the original translation and provides a newly “refurbished” look at an underappreciated gem of Soviet-era science fiction.

  THE ASTRONAUT

  Valentina Zhuravlyova

  Translated by James Womack

  “What can I do for the people?” Danko shouted, louder than thunder.

  And suddenly he tore at his chest with his hands and plucked out his heart and lifted it high above his head.

  MAXIM GORKY

  I should briefly explain why I went to the Central Archive of Space Travel. Otherwise what I am about to tell you would be incomprehensible.

  I am a spaceship’s doctor and have taken part in three missions. My medical speciality is psychiatry. Astropsychiatry, as they now call it. The problem I am working on is one that first arose a long time ago, in the 1970s. At that time a journey to Mars lasted more than a year, and one to Mercury almost two. The motors were only fired on takeoff and landing. Astronomical observations were not carried out on board—artificial satellites were used instead. What would the crew do then, over the long months of their journey? In the first years of space travel—practically nothing. This enforced inactivity led to nervous collapse, sapped people’s strength, caused illnesses. Reading and radio programs were not enough to replace what the first astronauts lacked. They needed work, creative work, which was what they were accustomed to. And then the idea of recruiting people who had outside interests was put forward. The idea was that it did not matter what they liked doing, as long as it gave them something to keep them busy during the flight. And so pilots were also extremely proficient mathematicians. Navigators were students of ancient manuscripts. Engineers spent all their free time writing poetry….

  In the flight manuals for astronaut training another point—the famous twelfth point—was added: “What are the candidate’s hobbies? What is the candidate interested in?” However, very soon another solution was found for the problem. For interplanetary travel, spaceships were fitted with atomic-ion drives. The length of flights was cut down to a few days. The twelfth point was removed from the training manuals. And then a few years later the problem reappeared, in an even more acute form. Mankind graduated to interstellar travel. Atomic-ion rockets, traveling at near-light speeds, still took years to fly to the closest stars. The time passed more slowly in the swiftly moving rocket, and flights could still take eight, or twelve, or even twenty years….

  The twelfth point appeared again in the flight manuals. In fact, it became one of the most important considerations for choosing a crew. Interstellar travel, from the point of view of the pilot, consisted of 99.99 percent downtime. Radio signals broke off a month or so after takeoff. After a month the interference was so great that optical signals had to be broken off. And ahead lay years, years, years….

  Back in those days rockets were manned by crews of six or eight, had tiny cabins and a fifty-meter greenhouse. For us, who now travel in interstellar liners, it is difficult to imagine how people managed without a gym, a swimming pool, a cinema, a promenade….

  I’m losing my thread and the story hasn’t even started yet. Nowadays the twelfth point no longer plays a major role in the choice of crew. For scheduled flights along standard routes that is only fair. However, for long-distance research flights people with hobbies are still needed as crew members. At least, that is my opinion. The twelfth point is the subject of my academic research. The history of the twelfth point has brought me here, to the Central Archive of Space Travel.

  I should acknowledge that the word archive isn’t one I like all that much. I am a starship’s doctor, and that is more or less the same as being an eighteenth-century ship’s doctor. I am used to traveling, to danger. I have made all three of my interstellar journeys on research trips. I participated in the first trip to Procyon and have always been filled with a desire for discovery. On the three planets that orbit Procyon there are several objects that I named: do you know what it’s like to name an ocean that you discovered?

  Archive was a word that frightened me. But things turned out differently from how I imagined. I don’t know, and haven’t yet been able to find out, who was the architect of the Central Archive of Space Travel. It must have been someone extremely talented. Talented and brave. The building is on the banks of the Siberian Sea, created twenty years ago when they built a dam on the Ob. The main building of the archive is on the hills by the seaside. I don’t know how they managed to do it, but it looks like the building hangs over the water. Light and aiming upward, it looks at a distance like a white sail….

  There are fifteen people who work in the archive. I have managed to strike up acquaintances with several of them. They are almost all of them temporary workers. An Austrian is gathering material on the first interstellar flight. There is a scholar, from Leningrad, writing a history of Mars. The shy Indian is a famous sculptor. He said to me: “I need to know their spiritual world.” There are two engineers: a husky chap from Saratov who looks like the heroic test pilot Chkalov and a small politely smiling Japanese man. They need to find background material for some project or other. I don’t know exactly what. When I asked him, the Japanes
e replied very politely: “Oh, it’s really nothing significant! It’s nothing for you to waste your attention on.” But I’m drifting away again. Back to the story.

  On the first day, in the evening, I spoke to the chief archivist. He is a man, still young, but who is almost completely blind as the result of a fuel tank explosion. He wears glasses with three lenses. They are blue. You can’t see his eyes. This makes it appear that the chief archivist never smiles.

  “So,” he said after hearing me out, “you need to start with the materials from Sector 0-14. I’m sorry, that’s our own internal classification, it won’t mean anything to you. What I mean is the first expedition to Barnard’s Star.”

  To my embarrassment, I knew almost nothing about this journey.

  “You flew in the other direction,” the chief archivist said, shrugging. “Sirius, Procyon, 61 Cygni…”

  I was surprised that he knew my service record so well.

  “Yes,” he continued, “the story of Aleksey Zarubin, the commander of that expedition, gives a very interesting answer to your question. They’ll bring you the materials in half an hour. Good luck.”

  His eyes were invisible behind the blue glass. But his voice sounded sad.

  And the materials are here on my desk. The paper is yellow, on several of the documents the ink (they used ink back then) has faded. But someone has carefully protected the text: infrared photofilms are attached. The paper is covered with transparent plastic; they feel dense and smooth to the touch.

  Out of the window—the sea. It slides dully up to the shore, the waves make a noise like pages being turned….

  In those days an expedition to Barnard’s Star was daring, maybe even desperate. It takes six years for light to reach from Earth to Barnard’s Star. The ship would be accelerating for half the journey, decelerating for the other half. And although sub-light speeds would be reached, the flight there and back would still take around fourteen years. For the people flying in the rocket, time would pass more slowly: fourteen years would become forty months. This is not an unusually long stretch of time, but the problem was that for almost all this time, thirty-eight months out of the forty, the ship’s engines would have to work at full power. The nuclear fuel reserves were calculated precisely. Any deviation from the path would mean the death of the expedition.

  Nowadays it seems like an unbelievable risk to set off into space without having sufficient fuel reserves, but back then there was no other option. The ship could carry no more than what the engineers managed to pack into the tanks.

  I read the report of the committee that chose the crew. The candidates for captain come up one by one and the committee always says: “No.” No, because the flight is exceptionally difficult, because colossal resilience needs to be combined with almost incredible daring. And suddenly the committee says: “Yes.”

  I turn a page. Here is where the story of Captain Aleksey Zarubin begins.

  Three pages further on and I start to understand why Aleksey Zarubin was unanimously chosen as the commander of the Pole. This man embodied to the most unusual extent both “ice” and “fire”: the calm wisdom of a researcher and the wild temperament of a warrior. This must have been why he was sent on dangerous missions. He always found a way to escape from what appeared to be the most hopeless situations.

  The committee had chosen the captain. As tradition dictated, the captain must now choose his crew. Speaking for myself, Zarubin didn’t really choose his crew. He simply invited five astronauts who had already flown with him. To the question: “Are you willing to go on a difficult and dangerous flight?” they all replied: “With you, yes.”

  In the materials there is a photograph of the crew of the Pole. It is monochrome, without depth. The captain was twenty-seven years old when it was taken. He looks older in the photograph: a full, slightly puffy face with prominent cheekbones, his lips tight shut, a prominent crooked nose, wavy soft-seeming hair, and strange eyes. They looked peaceful, almost lazy, but had somewhere in their corners a mischievous, reckless spark….

  The other astronauts are even younger. The engineers, a husband-and-wife team; there is a joint photograph in the file, they always flew together. The navigator had the thoughtful gaze of a musician. There was a female doctor. I suppose I must have looked just as serious in the first photograph they took of me when I joined the Star Fleet. The astrophysicist looks stubborn, his face is covered in burn marks; he and the captain once made an emergency landing on Dione, one of the moons of Saturn.

  Point twelve in the flight manual. I flick through the pages and confirm my hunch: the photograph told the truth. The navigator is a musician and a composer. The serious woman has a serious hobby: microbiology. The astrophysicist studies languages: he is already fluent in five, including Latin and Ancient Greek. The husband-and-wife engineers have only one hobby: chess, a new variant, with two queens of each color and an eighty-one-square board….

  The last entry in the twelfth point of the flight manual is that of the captain. He has a strange hobby—unusual, perhaps unique. I’ve never seen anything like it. That the captain had a keen interest in art ever since he was a child is understandable: his mother was an artist. But the captain paints very little, his interests lie elsewhere. He dreams of rediscovering the long-lost secrets of the old masters—how to make oil paints, how to blend them and prepare them for use. He carries out his chemical research, as he does everything, with the tenacity of a scientist and the temperament of an artist.

  Six people, six different characters, different fates. But the tone of the expedition is set by the captain. They love him, they believe in him, they support him. And so they all know how to be unflappably calm and unstoppably daring.

  Blast off.

  The Pole heads for Barnard’s Star. The nuclear reactor is working, an invisible stream of ions flows from the various nozzles. The rocket accelerates constantly, the crew feels this. To start with it is difficult to walk, difficult to work. The doctor insists on the imposition of a regimen of activity. The astronauts get used to the conditions of the flight. The greenhouse is set up, then the radiotelescope. Normal life begins. Monitoring the reactor, the equipment, the various mechanisms: this takes up very little time. Four hours a day are all that is required for the crew to work at their specializations. The rest of the time can be employed as each crew member prefers. The navigator composes a song—the whole crew ends up singing it. The chess players spend hours at the board. The astrophysicist reads Plutarch in the original….

  The log contains short entries: “The flight continues. The reactor and the ship’s equipment are working perfectly. Morale is excellent.” And suddenly there is one that sounds like a shout: “The rocket has passed the limit of reception of television signals. We saw the last report from Earth yesterday. How difficult to say good-bye to one’s homeland!” And the days still go by. Another entry: “Have set up the antenna for receiving optical signals. We hope that we will receive signals from Earth for another seven or eight days.” They were happy as schoolboys when the signals actually lasted another twelve days….

  Its speed increasing, the rocket headed toward Barnard’s Star. The months went by. The nuclear reactor worked with absolute accuracy. The fuel was spent exactly according to the plans, not a milligram more.

  The catastrophe happened without warning.

  One day—this was in the eighth month of the journey—the reactor started to function in a different way. A parallel reaction made the fuel consumption increase sharply. The brief entry in the log reads: “We do not know what has caused the side reaction.” Yes, back in those days they still did not know that infinitesimal impurities in nuclear fuel could sometimes change the speed of a reaction….

  The sea sounds outside the window. The wind is up, the waves are no longer rustling—they slap down cruelly as they come in to shore. Someone is laughing in the distance. I cannot, I should not be distracted. I can almost see these people in the rocket. I know them—I can imagine what it
was like. Perhaps I am mistaken about the details—but what importance does that have? And in fact no, I am not even mistaken in the details. I am sure that it happened exactly like this.

  In the retort, over a burner, a brown liquid boiled and bubbled. Brown smoke curled through the condenser. The captain was carefully examining a test tube filled with a dark red powder. The door opened. The flame of the burner flickered, jumped. The captain turned round. The engineer stood in the doorway.

  The engineer was shaken. He was under control, but his voice betrayed how agitated he was. It was someone else’s voice, louder, unrealistically harsh. The engineer tried to speak calmly and could not.

  “Sit down, Nikolay.” The captain pointed him to a chair. “I carried out these tests yesterday evening and got the same result….Sit down….”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Now?” The captain looked at his watch. “There’s fifty-five minutes to go till supper. So we can talk. Please tell everyone.”

  “Very good,” the engineer mechanically replied. “I’ll tell them. Yes, I’ll tell them,” He did not know why the captain was reacting so slowly. With every second the Pole was gathering speed, and a decision would have to be made forthwith.

  “Look,” said the captain, and handed him the test tube. “This will most likely interest you. This is mercury sulfide, cinnabar. A damn fine pigment. But it normally gets darker when exposed to light. I’ve figured it out—it’s all to do with particle size….”

  He spent a while explaining to the engineer how he had managed to produce a light-resistant cinnabar. The engineer impatiently shook the test tube. There was a clock set into the wall over the desk, and the engineer could not help glancing at it: thirty seconds, and the ship’s speed increased by two kilometers per second; another minute, another four kilometers per second….