Yefgenii feels a sudden profound longing to speak to his children. He sees their lives projecting into the future without him. He’ll live in their memories for a time, but the authorities will confiscate the photographs, their recollections will fade, they’ll be urged never to speak about him. He yearns to tell them where he is and describe these visions to them in detail. Only human beings can transmit a culture to future generations that exists beyond the material written in our genes. It is as if he understands this for the first time, where we live, and what we are.
He carries out the routine tasks that remain. He uses what power there is to charge batteries in the BO. He conducts systems checks. Even inside the lining gloves, his hands are blue with cold. He must rub them together and flex the fingers to keep the blood circulating. His body within the Orlan is tolerating the cold, but his extremities are not. When he can, he huddles in sunlit portions of the BO and lets the harsh brilliant light bathe him with precious warmth. But the temperature within Voskhodyeniye keeps falling, and no amount of solar heating will reverse the freeze.
All of a sudden, a drastic change occurs in the world around him. One of the ambient sounds to which he’s become accustomed has altered. At first Yefgenii cannot identify the change, then realization comes to him: the fan of the environmental control system has stopped. He floats to it with mounting panic. He holds himself to the metal grill. He feels no flow of oxygen. Frost clings to the grill’s tiny bars. He removes his gloves and scratches off some of it with his fingers. He cups the frost in his palm, and when it melts he licks up the precious moisture. He cleans the frost from the duct and then he resets the circuit, but the system doesn’t come back to life; it’s dead now, as dead as the radio and all the other systems that blinked out one by one, starved of electricity.
He carries out a rapid calculation. Under the tiny probe of his penlight, his pencil scratches out symbols on the pad. He knows the dimensions of the BO and the SA. He knows that at rest a man of his size consumes about 15 litres of oxygen every hour. As he works through the calculation and adds in his estimates of the oxygen reserves contained in his two space-suit backpacks and in the LK tanks, he realizes that sufficient oxygen remains to support a slingshot round the Moon and the return journey to Earth, provided of course that conditions don’t alter, with, for example, a fire or a breach of the spacecraft hull.
The flight rules in this instance aren’t flexible. As soon as the ship experienced a widespread electrical failure, an attempt at a lunar landing became reckless. Now that oxygen is limited, he must expedite a return to Earth. But Voskhodyeniye is already accelerating toward the Moon. The gravity of Earth has lost its influence and now the lesser body is reeling in the tiny metal boat. The great gray sphere looms through every porthole. The Moon has entered its last quarter. The western hemisphere beams back sunlight. At this distance the brilliance is dazzling.
Mission Control’s order would be to pitch the spacecraft 180 degrees over on its longitudinal axis in order to swing the LK-Block D assembly aft, then to fire the Block D engine and speed Voskhodyeniye along the free-return trajectory, so as to slingshot round the Moon and hurl the spacecraft onto a reciprocal course for Earth.
He shivers. He is drifting in the middle of the BO. His breath forms tiny spherical clouds. Time passes. The Moon grows closer. He is plunging toward the eastern limb, and into lunar shadow. Any further failure of the ship’s systems could leave him stranded in the realm of the Moon. Voskhodyeniye would orbit till he suffocated and eventually the orbit would decay until the spacecraft crashed somewhere on the airless waterless desolate surface.
Whatever outcome awaits him, Yefgenii must still apply himself to the necessary calculations, to be prepared to burn the engine at a specified time for a specified duration. He works through the numbers, either to accelerate the free-return trajectory or alternatively to decelerate the spacecraft so that it’ll be captured by the Moon’s gravitation and reeled into orbit.
By the time he completes the calculations, a coat of frost has spread over the coldest surfaces of the capsule, forming from the diminishing quantities of water vapor that he is generating from sweat and respiration. Once again he consults the reference figures in the flight plan. After four days in space, concentration is difficult. He checks and rechecks his working. On a number of occasions he’s some way through a calculation, then becomes disoriented and has to start again.
While he floats, while he ponders, the fourth day comes to an end. Decision time arrives, though he can even choose to do nothing and the ship will still travel the free-return trajectory back to Earth.
Ninety-eight hours into the mission, he slows the thermal control roll. He feels sick in the pit of his stomach from motion and hunger. His eyes are tired, and gritty from the dry air. His head aches.
Firing the thrusters causes the ship to stop, but then to begin rolling in the opposite direction. He must apply counterthrust to arrest the motion. He overcompensates and the ship wobbles back. He fires again and steadies her again. He knows he’s wasting fuel. Without the onboard computer to carry out maneuvers like this one, his flying is imprecise, it’s wasteful; it depletes the spacecraft’s fuel but also it depletes him.
The maneuvering is complete. Only six men before him have come this far, the crews of Apollo 8 and Apollo 10. A chance still exists for him to return to Earth, to see home again, to see the cheering crowds in Red Square, but this was not the objective of his ascent. He has not risen so far to emulate the achievements of other men, to choose a glory amortized by repetition; his destiny must be the perfect mission, the unique mission, that which no other man can do, which no other man would do.
Home hangs in a porthole. He raises his hand and just a thumbnail is enough to cover Earth. This far out, a man is bigger than countries: Yefgenii Yeremin is the size of the planets themselves.
He fires the Block D engine for three minutes and fifty-four seconds, decelerating the spacecraft. The ship no longer possesses the velocity to slingshot round the Moon and be flung home. He has surrendered to gravity and it captures him, like Icarus.
DARKNESS SURROUNDS THE FRAGILE METAL CRAFT. Voskhodyeniye is passing through the shadow of the Moon. Frost speckles the instruments and bulkheads of the cabin. Yefgenii wears his space gloves and communications helmet for warmth, stripping to the lining gloves only for delicate tasks. He huddles a metre above the floor. It doesn’t matter which part of the cabin he occupies, there’s no sunlight, no source of warmth. He blinks ever slower, falling asleep. Out of the porthole he glimpses a vast black hole in the stars. This is the surface of the Moon, drifting below. He sails across the unlit portion of the Near Side into the unlit portion of the Far Side. Only blackness spans the below.
He wonders if he is dreaming, if he’s at sail in a ship of the imagination, on a blank ocean, an ocean of souls. He dreams of Kiriya, and Skomorokhov, and little Gnido, of Bondarenko, Komarov and Gagarin, and of the Americans too, the nameless pilots in Korea whose aircraft shattered and burned before their parachutes could bloom; he dreams of them all, too many and too long ago to picture, and of Grissom, White and Chaffee, burning like Bondarenko burned, in a capsule too rich in oxygen, conquerors of the air being conquered by it.
Then the universe explodes. One star flares, a point of light expanding into a gigantic inferno that spreads across creation in a vast rippling disc of fire that consumes the stars and planets.