“Are you on holiday, daddy?” said the girl.
She hooked her arms round his midriff and looked up at him. She was tall for her age, her head reaching his chest, and she was bony like he’d become. Her eyes were big, and coloured with his blue. He gazed down at her and pulled a joking face. She curled a lip; she was too old for this now. The boy ran across the concrete kicking a football. In the apartment or outdoors, the boy ran everywhere; he carried his father’s energy with him. He was getting big. He was getting into fights.
The girl got frustrated when she didn’t get her way. She didn’t look much like him but she had his drive, his desire to win. The boy was milder. He had blond hair and blue eyes and Yefgenii couldn’t stop himself from scuffing his hair. He hugged them both. In his arms snuggled beautiful creatures made of soft pale flesh.
That night Gevorkian called at the apartment. The widow offered him supper but he declined. He had operational matters to discuss with her husband. Yefgenii picked his coat off the hook and the men strolled out to the elevator. He read a look in Gevorkian’s face that had been there the moment the widow had opened the door to him. They went out into the dark tree-lined avenue and the look didn’t shift.
“You’re to report to General Kamanin in the morning,” he said. “General Kamanin, the Chief Designer, and the senior members of the Space Committee. General Secretary Brezhnev has been briefed.”
The mission was on. Yefgenii Yeremin was the one name unknown to the spies in the West who followed the program. He’d leapfrogged the prime crews of the lunar training group not so much because he was the most able but because he was the most expendable.
“How will it work?” he said.
“Technicians are working round the clock to ready the L-3 for the next N-1 test flight, scheduled for July third. If the flight isn’t successful, reports will proclaim the rocket exploded on the launchpad during an unmanned test.”
Gevorkian paused. “The proposal will be put to you officially by General Kamanin. You will be given a free choice without fear of reprisals.” He kissed Yefgenii on the cheek. “Say no,” he said.
Yefgenii lay awake throughout the night. The children would miss him, their mother would miss him. The boy and the girl carried his genes and the few behaviors instilled by his minimal parenting. In this regard they were no different from animals. Man’s unique superiority was that his life’s legacy could surpass the reproductive, he could create history, exceed his own life and biology, but this applied to very few. No matter how happy and pleasurable their existence, most men were reckoned in terms no better than animals: they consumed, excreted, reproduced, died and decayed. So far, this was the measure of his own life: biology not history. Still the great mission he’d craved had remained elusive, the one that would write his name in the sky and colour him celestial.
As dawn came Yefgenii rose in silence. He sat at the edge of the bed, his eyes damp with tears. The widow stirred. She reached out. Her hand brushed his bare back, feeling the ridges of ribs and the hard plates of scapulae that had appeared in recent years not from privation but from single-minded discipline.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
He didn’t turn. His feet were planted on the floor, his back arched over, his head downturned. A breeze shifted the curtains. A yellow light played across his back and the profile of his head.
“What is it?” she said again.
This time he turned.
“They’ve got a mission for me,” he said, and in his eyes she saw what the mission must be, and she knew here came their destiny; here it came like a train with them on the tracks.
He passed through the rooms of the apartment, past the photographs of their life together, to the sleeping bodies of his children. He touched their heads, first the girl’s, then the boy’s, these strange and beautiful creatures. His tears fell. Ivan the Terrible was floating over their faces like a cloud passing over the face of the Moon. His form was becoming less solid. He was already becoming a ghost to them.
The Earth and the Moon
1969–
IVAN THE TERRIBLE sails in a ship named Voskhodyeniye. His dark vessel drifts against brilliant colours. Clouds mass in enormous white bands. They glow. He’s dazzled by weather the size of continents. In places the sky is empty all the way down. Patches of green dapple brown lands, but most of what curves below shines in great pools of blue. Everything glows. The clouds and seas radiate reflected sunlight. The oceans burn like blue suns. The Sun itself, unfiltered by the atmosphere, is a disc of energy fuelling a half sky of unbearable brilliance, bright beyond any glare he’s ever endured on Earth, warming one side of the modified Soyuz; then the Sun drifts behind the world, snuffed out by the planet, so that night stretches below and darkness all around, leaving only the flickering lights of the largest cities and the steady points of starlight, and all these sights must cram into stolen glimpses because there’s so much work for him to do.
The space inside is cramped. His space suit bulks him out. Only his head and hands are free, since on achieving orbit Mission Control cleared him to remove his bubble helmet and space gloves. He wears a leather communications helmet incorporating earpieces and a microphone. Checklists hang in the air, close-printed paper in plastic sleeves, at first glance motionless but over time sliding in a direction determined by the tiny momentum imparted when he places them. They are task enough for two men, let alone one. Yefgenii carries out the checks step by step. His fingers work the switches and circuit breakers of the SA. His eyes fixate on the switch markings as he checks them off; when a checklist is completed, he plucks the next from the air, seeing it’s drifted a few centimetres since the last time he looked.
Once he completes the SA checks, he reports to Mission Control. The SA is the re-entry capsule that will carry him back down to Earth on his return. All its systems are operational. The voice he hears back is Gevorkian’s; cosmonauts take turns being the sole member of Mission Control permitted to contact the man in space. Gevorkian clears Yefgenii to proceed into the BO.
He maneuvers through a tunnel out of the SA. His stomach bobs and bounces with every movement. The contents of his abdominal cavity are floating free, something that can be simulated on Earth for only a matter of seconds. He’s been weightless for over an hour now, the whole time working and moving, looking for handholds and pitching in every direction. Nausea drags at his stomach.
Emerging from the short access tunnel into the BO, Voskhodyeniye’s living compartment, he finds more space to work in, and he gets to it straight away. Above the storage locker that contains the Krechet lunar suit, he finds the main instrumentation console, and begins a long work routine of systems tests and checks. By the time he’s finished he’s circled the Earth and not once glanced out of the portholes to his left and behind him.
Next is scheduled a fifteen-minute break to rest, his first since lift off, and take on water. He drinks from a plastic bottle with a tube and valve from which he sucks in a predetermined load of 500 millilitres of fluid. While he rests, he hovers in the middle of the BO in a fetal position. Without gravity his legs tend to curl up toward his body. Optics obstruct his view out of most of the portholes, but in the gaps he can see segments of Earth and sky. The Earth is huge and brilliant, the sunny part of the sky so bright he must blot it out with metal blinds.
His next assignment is navigation. The rest break allows time to return to darkness, but he’s tense and restless, concerned at falling behind in the next critical phase of his work cycle.