The mission is almost certainly lost. He may never get home. He feels deep, depressing failure. Time is sliding by.
A single act can define the meaning of a man’s life. Everything to this point has been a rehearsal. The boy who ascended from the ruins of Stalingrad to the realm of space, the man hardened by cold and exile, this man has longed for the clash of metal against metal in a sky gleaming with beautiful machines, the climactic clash of cymbals of the two greatest powers in history. Like Gagarin, he has become his country. More: a hand drifts in front of the Earth framed in the porthole, and covers it. In space, a man is the size of countries. He must act, he must do what no one else could achieve. Throughout his career, he has craved a mission such as this one. Now he has it.
Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin unstows the emergency procedures checklists and begins to follow the protocols, using his penlight when the rotation of the craft transports his section of the BO into darkness, and bringing the metal blinds down when the Sun comes in, leaving just a crack of attenuated sunlight that sprays through the cabin.
He identifies which of the spacecraft’s systems are functioning and which are not. The environmental control system, which oxygenates and purifies the cabin atmosphere, is working. The flight-control systems are working when governed manually. The flight computer has crashed and is not recovering when rebooted. The communications system is not functioning.
This task carries him through to the end of his second diurnal cycle in space. Because of his absorption in work, he’s missed his food, fluid and rest breaks. He has made himself ill. His sunburn is agonizing. He is hungry, but hunger has become a moral ally in recent years: it reminds him he is disciplined, he will push himself farther than the ordinary man. He is dehydrated, but gulps of warm water renew him. He’s tempted to press on, but he is too weary. He opens the plastic pouches and metal tubes and consumes cubes of cheese and borscht in the form of a bland chewy paste. He needs to urinate again. His piss is an even deeper yellow. When he jettisons the waste into space, it doesn’t stream toward Earth; instead the crystals glide on the gentle escarpments of gravity, neither toward the planet nor away from it. One day, the ice may be captured by Earth’s pull, but till then it’ll drift in this cislunar space for countless centuries.
A little of the drinking water he lets out into the air. It forms a perfect sphere that wobbles and drifts in front of his eyes. He captures it in a cloth and lays it on the patch of sunburnt skin that forms a bright red triangle on his right flank. He winces. Every movement hurts. The cloth applies dampness for a mere moment, then, without gravity to hold it in place, it drifts off into the cabin. He snatches it and wrings out a tiny drop that hangs in the air for him to swallow. Then he sets aside the pain and returns to work.
According to the flight plan, now is the period to use any spare time for photography. Voskhodyeniye’s rotation is imperceptible apart from the creep of Earth and Moon across the portholes. Yefgenii keys the camera mounted in an optical port and shoots a series of images of the Earth setting and sometime later the Moon rising.
The Moon is waning gibbous. The Sun lights its surface from the west as far as the Sea of Serenity. His eyes rest on the Ocean of Storms, an ancient lava field stretching to the western limb of the lunar disc. Within its bounds lies the landing site selected for the mission, on a basalt plain about 500 kilometres west of the crater Kepler. These features are clearer and larger than he’s ever seen. The Moon is growing, though he knows he must be decelerating. The Earth’s pull is slowing the ship down but won’t ever quite stop it crossing the gravitational ridge into the Moon’s influence, and then the Moon will draw him in, ever faster.
Behind Voskhodyeniye the Earth is shrinking. Now it’s small enough to be banded by the porthole’s metal frame.
Yefgenii knows he is presumed lost. On Earth, his colleagues must consider the most likely explanation: that a catastrophic explosion occurred during the burn of the rocket engine. He pictures Gevorkian conveying the news to the widow, or perhaps another cosmonaut that she’d know, like Ges or Leonov. She remained at home with the children as he made final preparations at Baikonur, forbidden to attend Mission Control because it’s bad luck to lay eyes on a woman, except of course if she’s a technician. The night before liftoff, he went through the rituals, “for luck,” of transferring to the small house where Gagarin spent the night before his flight, of taking a sip of champagne with breakfast, of pissing on the wheel of the bus that carried him to the pad. An official telephoned her with the good news: liftoff was successful. He imagines she wept with relief. She hugged the children to her chest. The next call came: successful orbit, but then nothing. So there she is, in the apartment, as Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it falls to, informs her they’ve lost contact with Voskhodyeniye. There’s another knock at the door. It’s Ges’s wife, perhaps; another cosmonaut family will take care of the children, just for the time being. The hours crawl by. The telephone rings with a sympathy call from a senior space official, Mishin himself or perhaps even Kamanin, who assures her that everything possible is being undertaken to secure her husband’s safe return. She knows that minute by minute the technicians are endeavoring to make contact with the spacecraft; not only are they hearing nothing from the pilot, but also there is no relay of electronic information from the ship’s systems. This is explained in gentle terms by Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it is. An abrupt termination of telemetry signifies a catastrophic event befalling the spacecraft. The timing, the association with an engine firing, in an undertested propulsion system assembled in haste, all these factors together mean they must fear the worst. Of course, she asks if it might be something else, and of course they say, “yes,” but their voices are low and their eyes carry little conviction because a systems failure on the scale that would eliminate total telemetry would in all likelihood also render the spacecraft inoperative. The mission is lost. The craft is lost. Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin is lost.
The widow wants to be brave, but she weeps for her dead husband. The space officials too are sorrowful, but now they must address the question of how long to wait before issuing the statement planned in the event of such an outcome, that the N-1 blew up during an unmanned test on July 3.
He knows his name is being expunged from the records. He pictures the documents relating to his false identity being further falsified to show that he was discharged from the cosmonaut corps. They will go back, he imagines, to his flying records and his war records, and they too will vanish. The paper shreds, it burns. The photographs curl and blacken to smoke.
Yefgenii attempts to sleep. He unfolds the narrow metal frame to which he must strap himself, for fear of floating about the BO and causing injury to himself or his craft. He pictures the children asleep in their beds. In the morning their mother will tell them the story. He wonders if they’ll shed tears, or be numb, as he is numb now, numb and sleepless, watching a solitary globule of water, his tear, drift and ripple and from time to time glint in the light of the Earth and the Moon.
WHEN HE WAKES, he wonders for a moment where he is. The first thing that comes to mind is that he is a major now. General Kamanin awarded him the rank, at the extraordinary meeting of the Space Committee, in which he volunteered to pilot this mission designated N1-5L Soyuz-7K-L3-1. Kamanin asked his reason, and he replied, “To prove the superiority of the Soviet system.” He has made such statements so many times in his career that he may even have begun to believe the words, but in one matter there’s no question of self-deception. He loves his country, and he aims to see it again.