He feels cold and he’s uncertain whether the cabin temperature has dropped or it’s because he’s just woken from deep sleep. His chronometer shows he’s entered the third day of the flight. He can’t believe he fell asleep. His worries seemed too great.
Empty space fills the portholes. He searches for the trail of vented gas but either the sunlight isn’t striking the crystals or the tank has emptied. The Earth has shrunk again. Soon it won’t be much bigger than the face of his wristwatch, yet it remains so bright, much brighter than the most radiant full Moon.
Stubble roughens his face. His mouth is dry. He takes on water then he urinates. He consumes a portion of food concentrate. His bowels move, but the rectal sensation is only of partial fullness, so he prefers to postpone defecation.
Every movement tugs the taut skin of his sunburn; he feels it crack and ooze. He’s made a dressing by cutting out a small section of material from his flight suit. Blood and discharge stain the dressing black and yellow. He cannot further damage his flight suit nor risk expending water to wash the wound. The dressing remains in place, held by pieces of tape, melting into the burn, damp and reeking.
Hunger and dehydration accentuate his weakness. No man has travelled so far out by himself, no man has been so alone and apart from mankind. There is no one to speak to, no voice in his ears.
Already a sense of ritual surrounds his approach to the radio. He floats toward it, hoping to see enough of a glimmer in the power lights to put out a signal that he’s here, he’s alive, he’s still trying to hold this mission together. The lights are a row of glassy dots, and blank. He resets the circuit breaker and throws the power. The radio is dead, the ritual concludes. Next he decides to open the communications panel to see if he can identify any burnt-out wiring. He worries he’s wasting time on the radio when there’s so much else to do, but he longs to call out, and longs for an answering call. All the contacts appear intact. The radio’s dead, and he can see no means of reviving it.
To those on Earth he’s lived the commonplace tragedy of seeking and preparing for greatness and then being consumed by death while he remains ordinary. His widow and children will remember him as a husband and father. That is what will be passed on. An ordinary life will be recalled in the ordinary way, its events and meanings simplified to mundane accounts of mundane activities, much as our corpses cannot be assimilated whole, so nature breaks them down to simpler commonplace chemicals.
Once again he endeavors to reboot the flight computer. He follows the steps of the emergency checklist protocol. For over an hour he applies and adjusts the circuit settings but, as he expects, he does so without success. Now he decides he must establish his position. Again he follows a protocol established during training. He floats to the pilot’s control panel and once more is relieved to discover a response from the craft’s attitude control thrusters. This is the only bit of luck in what has befallen him. Voskhodyeniye remains his to fly, for the time being at least, and therein lies the chance, however slim, of getting home.
He attempts to arrest the thermal control rotation. Without the computer, his actions are imprecise. He kills most of the roll but the ship’s motion has been infected by tiny germs of pitch and yaw that he can’t eradicate, and he knows he can’t afford to burn kilo after kilo of rocket fuel trying in vain to do so. Like the nagging nausea caused by the wobble, he’s just got to live with it.
Yefgenii draws the blinds on the sunward side of the BO and sets himself up at the sextant. One advantage of the extensive power failure is that there is no pollution from the cabin lighting.
He uses his penlight to study the flight plan, which allows for two midcourse corrections. At this point he must carry out a navigation sighting of five stars with respect to Earth’s horizon. Because it’s so much smaller now, he must add a telescope eyepiece to the sextant in order to identify the substellar point, the nearest part of the horizon to the datum star.
The ship’s wobble still sickens him. He struggles to align the sextant as the device’s superimposition of star and planet pitches and yaws and rolls in the eyepiece, while he braces himself in a half-kneeling position against the bulkhead. Next he reorients Voskhodyeniye so he can carry out the same procedure with respect to the Moon. When it appears in the optics porthole, he draws back. It has swollen into a gray globe whose size is unsettling. The Moon has turned in its orbit round the Earth; the face that always points to the Earth — the Near Side, the Earth side — always does so in synchronous rotation, and this face has become more oblique to the Sun. Now shadow engulfs the Sea of Serenity, creeping westward over the Caucasus.
When he’s completed his observations, he reestablishes Voskhodyeniye in the thermal control maneuver that rolls the capsule three times every hour. The new rotation is as contaminated by pitch and yaw as before, but of a new character. He finds the altered sense of jumbled motion difficult to adjust to, having become accustomed to its previous components. He needs to put a vomit bag to his chin. He retches, but nothing comes up. He retches again and this time regurgitates a small clump of food paste and gastric acid, which he spits into the bag. He hovers as still as he can manage. Eventually the motion sickness remits to a tolerable level. He packs the vomit bag into the waste management system, to be jettisoned into space.
Yefgenii compiles his stellar observations and then works with log tables to determine his position. The combined calculations of the onboard computer and those at Mission Control would produce the answer in a matter of minutes, but by hand and mind the process is as difficult as Gevorkian predicted. It consumes three hours.
He takes a break for rest, fluid and food. As he swallows the paste he hears his bowels gurgle. He feels a motion, then more pressure in his rectum. Again he decides to postpone defecation.
His pencil scratches out the final calculations on his thigh-pad. Papers spread in front of him, floating in an array over the flight plan. The flight plan contains sample reference calculations so he can judge with some certainty the accuracy of his own conclusions.
He fears the dysfunctional translunar injection has failed to propel Voskhodyeniye into the designated free-return trajectory, or the venting of gas from the ruptured tank is acting like a small rocket and pushing the spacecraft off course, but his own observations show the spacecraft’s present translunar coast appears closer to nominal parametres than he dared hope. With no further deviations, he’ll slingshot round the Moon and back toward the Earth in a figure eight.
Pushing away from the porthole, he drifts to the environmental control system. Air flows, but chills his hand. The heating has gone offline. For a moment he considers what this means. The permutations cross and conflict. He pushes them aside. The spacecraft can work in cold, for the time being at least; a man too.
He must decide whether or not to carry out the first midcourse correction. It’s the only way to keep alive the possibility of attempting a Moon landing. However, his own survival is much more likely if he abandons this element of the mission now and concentrates all his efforts on returning safely to Earth.
Yefgenii sets about making the calculations based on how far off the nominal course he’s gone since translunar injection. Again, the flight plan offers reference figures to guide him through the intricate process, and he uses the log and trig tables compiled for the purpose.