Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Cocooned in the artificial light of his cabin, exhilarated and in control, he grinned through the mounting pain.

  Swallow’s protective shroud cracked open. He could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of the booster; they glittered around the craft like snow.

  At five minutes the acceleration died, and Gagarin was hurled forward against his restraints. He heard rattles as the main booster core was discarded. Then came the crisp surge of the ‘half stage’ which would, at last, carry him to space.

  Gagarin felt his speed mount, impossibly rapidly.

  Then the final stage died. He was thrown forward again, and he grunted.

  The automatic orientation system switched on. Swallow locked its sensor on the sun, and swivelled in space; he could feel the movement, as gentle and assured as if he was a child in the womb, carried by his mother’s strong muscles, and he knew he was in orbit.

  It was done. And, as the ship turned, he could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath him like a glowing carpet.

  ‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘Oh my. What a beautiful sight.’

  That was when the voices started.

  … Much was made of the fact that Yuri Gagarin was an ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union. He was born in the Gzhatsk District of Smolensk and entered secondary school in 1941. But his studies were interrupted by the German invasion. After the Second World War Gagarin’s family moved to Gzhatsk, where Yuri resumed his studies. In 1951 he graduated with honours from a vocational school in the town of Lyubersy, near Moscow. He received a foundryman’s certificate. He then studied at an industrial technical school in Saratov, on the Volga, from which he graduated with honours in 1955. It was while attending the industrial school that the man who would be the first to fly in space took his first steps in aviation, when he commenced a course of training at the Saratov Aero Club in 1955 …

  Voices – chattering and whispering around the capsule – as if he was dreaming. Was this some artefact of weightlessness, of the radiations of space?

  The voices faded.

  … And yet this was dream-like, voices or no voices. Here he was falling around the Earth, at a height nobody had approached before. And objects were drifting around him in the cabin: papers, a pencil, a small notebook, comical in their ordinariness, pushed this way and that by tugs of air from his life-support fans. This was weightlessness, a sensation no human had experienced before.

  Briefly, he was overwhelmed with strangeness.

  And yet he felt no ill-effects, no disorientation; it was remarkably comfortable, and he knew it would be possible to do good work here, even to build the cities in space of which the designers dreamed.

  He would complete a single orbit of the Earth, passing across Siberia, Japan, the tip of South America, and west Africa.

  He peered out eagerly, watching Earth as no man had seen it before. There were clouds piled thickly around the equator, reaching up to him. Over the baked heart of the Soviet Union he could see the big squares of the collective farms, and he could distinguish ploughed land from meadows. It would take twenty minutes, of his orbit’s ninety, just to cross the vast expanse of his homeland.

  The Earth seemed very near, even from two hundred kilometres.

  … And again he heard a voice – this time his own, somehow echoing back at him, from somewhere beyond the hull of the spacecraft: We are peace-loving people and are doing everything for the sake of peace. The Soviet man – be he a geologist, polar explorer, builder of power stations, factories or plants, or space engineer and pilot – is always a seeker …

  The voice, echoing as if around some gigantic museum, faded and vanished.

  He felt irritation, mixed with apprehension. Strange voices were not in the flight plan! He had not been trained for this! He had no desire for his mission to be compromised by the unexpected!

  The voices could not, of course, have been real. He was cocooned in this little craft like a doll in wood shavings. The padded walls of his cabin were just centimetres from his gloved fingers. Beyond that, there was nothing, for hundreds of kilometres …

  And yet, it was as if, briefly, he had no longer been alone. And still that feeling refused to leave him; suddenly the Vostok seemed small and absurdly fragile – a prison, not a refuge.

  As if someone was watching him.

  For the first time in the mission, he felt the breath of fear. Perhaps, as the psychologists had warned, the experience of his catapulting launch from the Earth had affected him more deeply than he had anticipated.

  He put his uneasiness aside, and fulfilled his duties. He reported the readings of his instruments. He tried to describe what he saw and felt. Weightlessness was ‘relaxing’, he said. And so it was: with his restraints loosened, floating above his couch, Gagarin felt as if he was flying his favoured MiG-15, low over the birch trees around Star City.

  He recorded his observations in a log-book and on tape. His handwriting had not changed – here in space it was just as it had been on Earth, just as he had learned so long ago in the schools of Klushino – but he had to hold the writing block or it would float away from his hands.

  And he maintained his stream of messages, for the people of Earth. ‘ … The present generation will witness how the free and conscious labour of the people of the new socialist society turns even the most daring of mankind’s dreams into reality. To reach into space is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the laws of natural development …’

  Even as he spoke, he studied Earth through his Vzor telescope.

  White clouds, curved blue sea: the dominant impression. The clouds’ white was so brilliant it hurt his eyes to look at the thickest layers too long, as if a new sun was burning from beneath them, on the surface of the Earth. And the blue was of an extraordinary intensity, somehow hard to study and analyse. The light was so bright it dazzled him, making it impossible to see the stars; thus, the Earth turned, as it always had, beneath a canopy of black sky.

  It was easier to look at the land, where the colours were more subtle, greys and browns and faded greens. It seemed as if the green of vegetation was somehow filtered by the layer of air. Cultivated areas seemed to be a dull sage green, while bare earth was a tan brown, deepening to brick red. Cities were bubbly grey, their boundaries blurred. He was struck by the land’s flatness, the way it barely seemed to protrude above the ocean’s skin … There was truly little separating land and sea.

  But it was hard to be analytical, up here, on the ultimate flight; it was enough simply to watch.

  He flew into darkness: the shadow of Earth. Reflections from the cabin lights on the windows made it hard to see out, but still Gagarin could make out the continents outlined by splashes of light, chains of them like streetlights along the coasts, and penetrating the interiors along the great river valleys. The chains of human-made light, the orange and yellow-white spider-web challenging the night, were oddly inspiring. But Gagarin was struck by how much of the planet was dark, empty: all of the ocean, of course, save for the tiny, brave lights of ships, and great expanses of desert, jungle and mountain.

  Gagarin was struck not so much by Earth’s fragility as by its immensity, the smallness of human tenure, and the Vostok, for all the gigantic energy of its launch, was circling the Earth like a fly buzzing an elephant, huddled close to its hide of air.

  Over the Pacific’s wrinkled hide he saw a dim glow: it was the light of the Moon.

  He turned his head, and let his eyes adapt to the new darkness. Soon, for the first time since the launch, he was able to see the stars.

  The sky was crowded with stars, he saw; it was something like the sky over the high desert of the Gobi, where he had completed his survival training, the air so thin and dry as to be all but perfectly transparent. Craning to peer through the tiny windows he sought the constellations, star patterns familiar since his boyhood, but the sky was almost too crowded to make them out …

  Everywhere, stars were green.

&nb
sp; The nearby stars, for instance: Alpha Centauri and Sirius and Procyon and Tau Ceti, names from science fiction, the homes of mankind in the ages to come. Green as blades of grass!

  He tipped his head this way and that. Everywhere he looked it was the same: stars everywhere had turned to chlorophyll green.

  What could this mean?

  Yuri Gagarin flew on, alone in the dark of the Earth, peering out of his warm cabin into an unmarked celestial night.

  At last he flew towards the sunlight once more. This first cosmonaut dawn was quite sudden: a blue arc, looking perfectly spherical, which suddenly outlined the hidden Earth. The arc thickened, and the first sliver of sun poked above the horizon. The shadows of clouds fled across the ocean towards him, and then the clouds turned to the colour of molten copper, and the lightening ocean was grey as steel, burnished and textured. The horizon brightened, through orange to white, and the colours of life leaked back into the world.

  The green stars disappeared.

  Space was a stranger place than he had imagined.

  He looked down at the Earth. To Gagarin now, the Earth seemed like a huge cave: warm, well-lit, but an isolated speck on a black, hostile hillside, within which humanity huddled, telling itself stories to ward off the dark. But Gagarin had ventured outside the cave.

  Gagarin wished he could return now, wished his brief journey was even briefer.

  He closed his eyes. He sang hymns to the motherland. He saw flashes of light, meteoric streaks sometimes, against the darkness of his eyelid. He knew this must be some radiation effect, the debris of exploded stars perhaps, coursing through him. His soft human flesh was being remade, shaped anew, by space.

  So the minutes wore away.

  It would not be long now. He anticipated his return to Earth, when the radio commands from the ground control would order his spaceship to prepare itself. It would orient in its orbit, and his retro-rockets would blaze, slamming him with a full-body blow, forcing him back into his couch. Then would come the brief fall into the atmosphere, the flames around his portholes as the ablative coating of Swallow turned to ash, so that he became a man-made comet, streaking across the skies of Africa and Asia. And at last his ejection seat would hurl him from the spent capsule, and from four thousand metres he would drift to Earth on his parachute – landing at last in the deep spring air, perhaps on the outskirts of some small village, deep in the homeland, such as his own Klushino. The reverie warmed him.

  Have you come from outer space?

  Yes, he would say. Yes, I have. Would you believe it? I certainly have …

  But the stars, he would have to tell them, are green.

  … We can’t continue. The anomalies are mounting. The Poyekhali is becoming aware of its situation.

  Then we must terminate.

  Do you authorize that? I don’t have the position to –

  Just do it. I will accept the blame.

  Again, the voices! He tried to shut them out, to concentrate on his work, as he had been trained and he had rehearsed.

  He had no desire to return to Earth a crazy man.

  And yet, even if it had to be so – horrible for him, for Valentia! – still his flight would not have been without value, for at least something would have been learned about the insidious deadliness of space.

  He threw himself into his routine of duties once more. The end of the flight was crowding towards him, and he still had items to complete. He monitored his pulse, respiration, appetite and sensations of weightlessness; he transmitted electrocardiograms, pneumograms, electroencephalograms, skin-galvanic measurements and electro-oculograms, made by placing tiny silver electrodes at the corners of his eyes.

  He ate a brief meal, a lunch squeezed from tubes stored in a locker set in the wall. He ate not because he was hungry, but because nobody had eaten in space before: Gagarin ate to prove that such normal human activities were possible, here in the mouth of space. He even drifted out of his couch and exercised; he had been given an ingenious regime based on rubber strips, which he could perform without doffing his pressure suit …

  Again, a noise from outside the craft. Unfamiliar voices, a babble.

  Laughter.

  Were they laughing at him? As if he was some ape in a zoo cage?

  And – Holy Mother! – a scraping on the hull, as if hands were clambering over it.

  The noises of the craft – the steady hum and whir of the instruments, the clatter of busy pumps and fans – all of it stopped, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch.

  Gagarin waited, his breath loud in his ears, the only sound.

  The hatch, behind Gagarin’s head, scraped open. His ears popped as pressure changed, and a cold blue light seeped in on him.

  There were shadows at the open port.

  Not human shadows.

  He tried to scream. He must reach for his helmet, try to close it, seek to engage his emergency air supply.

  But he could not move.

  Hands on his shoulders, cradling his head. Hands, lifting him from the capsule. Had he landed? Was he dreaming again? A moment ago, it seemed to him, he had been in orbit; and now this. Had something gone wrong? Had he somehow re-entered the atmosphere? Were these peasants from some remote part of the Union, lifting him from his crashed Swallow?

  But this was not Kazakhstan or any part of the Union, and, whatever these creatures were, they were not peasants.

  He was out of the craft now. Faces ringed his vision. They looked like babies, he thought, or perhaps monkeys, with grey skin, oversized heads, huge eyes, and small noses, ears and mouths. He could not even tell if they were men or women.

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them, the faces were still there, peering in on him.

  He could not read their emotions. But it did seem to him that he found in one of the distorted faces a little more – compassion. Interest, at least …

  So. Do you think this Poyekhali is conscious of where it is?

  It could be. It seems alert. If it is, we have broken the sentience laws …

  The heads were raised in confrontation.

  I won’t be held responsible for that. The systems are your accountability.

  But it was not I who –

  Enough. Recriminations can wait. For now, we must consider – it.

  They studied him again.

  Perhaps he was, simply, insane.

  He had, he realized with dismay, no explanation for this experience. None, that is, save his own madness, perhaps induced by the radiation of space …

  The beings, here with him, were floating, as he was.

  He was in a room. His Vostok, abandoned, was suspended here, like some huge artefact in a museum. The Vostok looked as fresh as if it had just come out of the assembly rooms at Baikonur, with no re-entry scorching.

  He looked beyond his spacecraft.

  The room’s walls were golden. But the room’s shape was distorted, as if he was looking through a wall of curved glass, and so were the people themselves.

  They seemed to have difficulty staying in one place. They could pass through the walls of this room at will, like ghosts.

  They even passed through his body. He could not move, even when they did this.

  They took hold of his arms, and pulled him towards the wall of the room. He looked for his Vostok spacecraft, but he could no longer see it.

  He passed into the wall as if it was made of mist; but he had a sense of warmth and softness.

  Now he was in a cylindrical room. He was enclosed in a plastic chair with a clear fitted cover. The cover was filled with a warm grey fluid. But there was a tube in his mouth and covering his nose, through which he could breathe cool, clean air. A voice in his mind told him to close his eyes. When he did so he could feel pleasing vibrations, the fluid seemed to whirl around him, and he was fed a sweet substance through the tubes. He felt tranquil and happy. He kept his eyes closed, and he seemed to become one with the fluid.

  Later he was moved, within his sac. He w
as taken through tunnels and elevators from one room to another. The tunnels varied in length, but ended usually with doorways into brightly lit, dome-shaped rooms.

  After a time his fluid was drained and he was taken out of the sac. It was uncomfortable and dry and his head hurt. He was pinned to a table. He was naked now, his orange flight suit gone. He did not seem able to resist, or even to help in any way, had he wished.

  He was in another room, big and bright.

  Though he was not uncomfortable, he found he could not move, not even close his eyes. He was forced to stare unceasingly up at a ceiling, which glowed with light.

  He waited, laid out like a slab of meat in a butcher’s shop.

  His fear faded. Even his bewilderment receded, failing to overwhelm him. Who were these monkey-people? Who were they to treat him like this? … But he could not move, so much as a finger.

  One of the monkey-faces appeared before him. It studied him, with – at least – interest. He wondered if this was the one who, an immeasurable time before, had beheld him with a trace of compassion.

  … Do not be afraid.

  The wizened mouth did not move, and he could not understand how he heard the words, yet he did.

  However, he was not afraid.

  The being seemed to be hesitating. Do you know who you are?

  Of course he knew who he was! He was Flight Major Yuri Gagarin! The first man in space! …

  He remembered the laughter.

  He felt anger course through him, dispelling the last of his fear. Who were these people to mock him?

  This should not have happened. It has never happened before.

  Hands – human, but stretched and distorted – reached towards him. And then withdrew.