Once again with the tip of his nose he wipes an iris in the mist of his visor. He activates the controls on the outside of the hatch to open the port and he is grateful that they work. The lander’s batteries should still retain much of the charge present when he switched the LK into its dormant mode for the transit to the Moon.
He struggles through the oval opening. His suit has swollen and stiffened, or so it seems, but more likely his muscles have weakened. He clambers into the lander and works the levers of the hatch closed. The lights are on, and he’s able to pressurize the cabin.
As the atmospheric pressure rises, he feels his spacesuit soften. The material becomes flexible again, but in moving with greater freedom he realizes the inner layers covering his armpits and lower back are soaked and so heavy with sweat they’re like wet rags.
With enormous relief he removes his gloves, EVA helmet and bubble helmet. Steam issues from his collar and cuffs. His face is bright red, his hands are swollen. He is gasping for breath but the heating system has yet to warm the LK, or it’s failed, so that his teeth and tongue are chilled by mouthfuls of frozen air.
At once he sets to work powering up the LK’s communications system. As with the LOK, sporadic electrical failures affect the vehicle’s control systems. A power surge has travelled throughout the stack, to the LK possibly from the LOK via the umbilical connection. In any event, he is unable to activate the radio.
Yefgenii toils through a sequence of procedures to open communications. The checklists in the LK offer him a number of alternatives. He tries them all, one by one. He resets switches. He shuts down related systems. He powers up related systems. He repeats the sequence again in its entirety, without success.
He drifts for a time in the cabin. Through the upper viewport he gazes at the arching back of the Voskhodyeniye stack. A curve of metal slices the Earth into a glowing crescent of blue and white. He decides to try once again to activate the radio. He turns all the control switches to off and then throws them on one by one. He trips and resets the circuit breaker. The lander’s radio is as dead as the LOK’s. The crescented Earth hangs in the upper viewport like the downturned mouth of a sorrowful cartoon.
Following a rapid assessment, Yefgenii concludes that while many of the lander’s essential operating systems show promise, in their present condition none of them gives him the option of relaying a message to Earth. The LK possesses no power supply of its own. Apart from the charge in its batteries, it depends on the LOK for electricity.
Yefgenii wipes his visor clean with his silk lining gloves and then relocks the helmets and outer gloves to the suit’s metal collar and cuffs. He is anxious and depressed but cannot afford to let himself get diverted. With as much haste as he can muster in his state of fatigue, he shuts down the LK’s systems. The lander returns to its dormant state, its batteries spared for another day.
He clambers out of the hatch into unfiltered sunlight. The roll of the spacecraft caused by the Block G explosion has oriented the hatches toward the blinding yellow disc. The space suit’s protective layers shield his body from the unattenuated radiation, but, as Yefgenii slides along the tethering line, he begins to feel a scorching pain in his side. He concludes that one or two layers must have torn as he fought to right himself during the earlier violent toppling movements. Now every panel of the spacecraft’s hull beams burning UV light at him.
The thread of frozen gas coils from the damaged lox tank back toward the diminishing Earth. This time he is determined to reach the tank in the simplest manner. Gathering in the tether, he floats on past the LOK hatch and aft toward the power module, and now begins to let out the tether with the correct timing to stop it from snapping taut and springing him back or out or whichever wrong way.
Yefgenii manages to ease himself into a small turn, angling his scorched side away from the Sun, and feels a sudden drop in heat and pain. He drifts to the tank and at close quarters inspects the crack in its casing like a crack in an eggshell. One small puncture vents the oxygen. The gas freezes in an instant. The sight is strange. He feels he is watching snowflakes form; he is watching the processes of nature laid bare.
He presses his glove over the puncture. He is able to mend small punctures in his suit with a repair kit and this is the only means at his disposal for attempting to contain the lox leak. He removes his hand to reveal a plaque of ice that pops open with the pressure of gas behind it, the plaque shattering into shards of crystals.
Yefgenii opens the repair kit. In looking down into it, he enters a very slow tumble, which he corrects by throwing his free hand out onto the hull. He bounces off and tumbles in the opposite direction. He feels pain tear at the scorched section of his skin and then, as it turns into the Sun, he feels it light like a fire. He screams in pain but fights not to oppose the rotation. He lets it hurt and then it passes as his body rotates into its own shadow. He brings out the sticky patch from the repair kit and struggles to hold it between fat swollen inflexible fingertips. He is unable to manipulate the patch and unable to uncover the adhesive backing, his fingers are too fat and rigid in the space gloves. He keeps on trying. He is tumbling end over end and he is getting sick, but he keeps struggling to get the patch into a form he can use to stem the leaking lifeblood of his spacecraft, but it’s beyond him, it’s beyond any man, and the patch slips from between his fingers and he lunges for it, but the gloves are too thick and rigid and he is now turning in the wrong direction, turning to the Sun again; this time, when the sunlight strikes, he can’t hold back, he emits a deep primal roar that fills his space suit and reverberates through every layer and joint of it but in the vacuum of space travels no farther.
HE FEELS THE HEAT OF THE SUN on his body, the solid band of light that divides the BO into day and night. Soon the sunward portion of the spacecraft will overheat and the shaded side freeze. He returns to the pilot’s seat and straps himself in. He sets and fires a thruster. Voskhodyeniye jerks into a slow roll, but, without the computer’s assistance, he can manage the maneuver in only an imprecise fashion, so that the spacecraft’s rotation is skewed by small amounts of pitch and yaw. He’s trying to get the whole stack turning, the LOK and the docked lander, but as a result Voskhodyeniye is also wobbling. He feels something in his stomach, the subclinical nausea experienced in an aircraft flying out of rudder trim, but he’s done the best he can, and, as the stack rolls, the solar heating is distributed over its shell with an approximate uniformity. He’ll have to live with the nausea.
When he pauses to take stock, he becomes conscious of the agony of his sunburn. A scarlet triangle has blistered and tightened on his flank. The spacecraft carries no dressings or ointments; not another gram of weight could’ve been added to the launch payload. He must take water to avoid dehydration; he must keep the lesion clean to avoid infection. The pain he can only endure.
Out of a porthole, Yefgenii sees that the debris that shook loose when he jettisoned the Block G engine has now drifted clear of the spacecraft. The Block G itself glides about 500 metres behind, no longer shedding small showers of ice, and nearby float the staves of the payload shroud that resemble the leaves of a tulip curling open to the Sun.
He searches for the trail of vented gas. The ship continues its slow roll, and this is how he eventually gets to see it, as the sunlight rolls onto a gentle curving arc of ice crystals threading out from somewhere on the spacecraft and trailing away into space. The tank is still venting. No measure at his disposal can stem the leak. He’s losing the raw material from which Voskhodyeniye’s fuel cells generate electricity, water and oxygen.