He wakes to gaze upon the secret face of the Moon. The Sun has risen across the lunar horizon, and now light is blazing across the craters of the Far Side. Millions of years of meteorite impacts have pitted the surface into a featureless scarred ruin, without mountains, without rilles, without the striking basalt plains of the misnomeric lunar seas. The Moon has passed its last quarter, but this is as viewed from Earth; the Sun lights the Far Side into a waxing gibbous Moon that arches into shadow behind him and curves toward the Near Side ahead.
He drifts toward the Sun, like an etiolated plant struggling toward the light, and bumps against the porthole. The dazzling light scorches through into the cabin. He huddles in it, craving warmth, but frost streaks the panels and gauges and pipework, and even coats his space suit, so that as he moves it crinkles and floats off into the air, where it drifts as glistening confetti.
Perhaps he’s still dreaming. His ship of the imagination appears to be travelling backward in time. The lunar shadow recedes from Voskhodyeniye. The ship is sinking toward the Sun, then toward the Earth, then he will return to cislunar space, wherein the Moon presents him with yesterday’s waning gibbous face hours before last quarter, and he is back in the time of making calculations and planning whether to pitch the spacecraft round and fire the Block D to hurry himself home, or to insert Voskhodyeniye into lunar orbit.
Now he remembers. He made the insertion burn. The spacecraft is swinging behind the Moon and heading back toward Earth, not to return but to establish lunar orbit. He’s not dreaming. He’s here. This is what he’s done, and he asks himself if he was right, or if this isn’t the supreme folly of a life which, if surveyed backward in the dreamy voyage of his ship of the imagination, falls from the Korean sky glinting with metal and fire where Ivan the Terrible was born, into the soot and ruins of Stalingrad. Babak, that was his name, the boy who raped him: from that nadir Babak is the one who ascends to the flight school at Chkalov, and another VVS ace, Pepelyaev, is the one who wins more jet kills than any pilot in history, and Armstrong and Aldrin will be the first visitors to the surface of the Moon. It may as well be, because Ivan the Terrible never existed, because Earth has assumed him lost and turns with aloof serenity, turns in the sky as if by turning from west to east, from night into day, she is turning her beautiful watery blue back to him.
Yet in gazing down at the secret face below, he feels fulfilled in choosing the Moon over the Earth. For eons the Far Side has been invisible to man, yet it has always been here, and, like his own voyage that is unknown and invisible to those on Earth, it is no less beautiful or dramatic because of it.
So he is here. The one illuminated feature he recognizes drifts below, a plain circular patch of ancient lava, like an ectopic gray eye on a pitted brown face: the Eastern Sea. The curve of the lunar limb bulges ahead. He is sailing from the Far Side onto the Near Side, the Earth Side, and then he glimpses her, rising, the only coloured thing in the universe, the brilliant blue-and-white disc of home. She is floating on a black sea, a part submerged buoy that appears to pull against an invisible anchor, straining out of the blackness to mark the solitary known point of water and life.
He weeps. He thinks perhaps it is from tiredness, from the tyrannies of thirst, hunger and cold, but he is a man watching the earthrise, and he is weeping.
His gloved fingers paw his cheeks. He captures the tears on his fingertips and licks the moisture before it freezes. His mouth is dry. His cheeks and lips are numb and cracked. He purges the dying fuel cells. Only one remains working. He gleans its meager production of water, and drinks. He scrapes frost off the cabin’s frozen surfaces and cups it in his hand, where it melts, and then he drinks that too.
The Ocean of Storms slides below. The spacecraft has curved round the edge of the visible land and now is traversing the Near Side, which has diminished to a little less than half-lit. The face is a waning crescent, but broad, bulging, and stretching just about as far as the westernmost escarpment of the lunar Appenines.
He identifies the landing site at once, bounded by a triangle of distinctive craters, Kepler, Marius, and Reiner. Voskhodyeniye is sailing on, over the Ocean of Storms, over the Bay of Dew and the Bay of Rainbows, over the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Moisture. Now the ancient nomenclature acquires a bitter irony.
Not only is Voskhodyeniye crossing the surface, but she should also be rising away from it. The decelerating burn was designed to place the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit spanning 280 kilometres by 100. The closest approach, the pericynthion, should lie over the landing site.
By eye he finds it impossible to judge altitude. The gray-brown beach rolls under the ship, but he has no experience of this perspective, and no instruments to guide him. No precise method of measuring the orbit can operate without the computer and out of contact with Mission Control.
Yefgenii decides he must acquire an approximation of the spacecraft’s altitude and velocity. The landing site has been mapped by unmanned probes. The dimensions of its most distinctive features are entered in the flight plan, and they’ve been used as part of his training, in the hope that he might acquire a sense of visual perspective on the descent to the landing site. Using the sextant he attempts to measure the angles between the craters Kepler and Marius. He works as fast as he can, but the craters speed by before he can take the measurement.
Instead he decides to time an orbit over the crater Copernicus, but he knows he won’t be timing a true rev, as the Moon will also rotate on its own axis. He must factor this in for accuracy.
Two hours later he is back over the landing site, and this time set up with the sextant, so that he manages to measure the angle of separation between Kepler and Marius while the spacecraft is directly overhead, and then he watches Copernicus roll under, and marks the time on his chronometer. He also starts the chronometer’s second stopwatch.
Without delay he embarks on his calculation. The apparent angular separation of Kepler and Marius will permit him to calculate his altitude above the landing site as the height of an isosceles triangle above the base given by the known distance between the two craters. The duration of one rev will reveal his orbital velocity.
When Voskhodyeniye first enters the lunar shadow, the only light in the BO originates from Earth. The clouds and oceans reflect the Sun’s light with four times the radiance of the Moon. He braces at a porthole and contorts to bring his notepad into the earthlight. Soon the spacecraft’s orbit carries it over the Far Side, and the Earth sets behind the Moon.
Yefgenii slides the penlight out of a pocket of his space suit and continues. After ten minutes, the light flickers and dies. The battery has given out. The mission carried the light for emergency use only, and the engineers deemed a spare battery a luxury, given the flight’s strict payload limits. Every item aboard has been weighed and its value calculated. The calculations have been balanced down to whether the mission is better served by an extra roll of film for the camera or by an additional bullet for the crew revolver in the event of a wilderness touchdown and the need to repel wild animals.
His universe is one of cold and almost total darkness. The faint glimmers of stars speckle the black sky, but the light is negligible. The interior of the cabin, even his own body, is invisible to him. The cold oppresses him. He feels it push into his throat and down into his lungs, turning his blood lukewarm. It is chilling his bones.
It seems an age but is in truth only a matter of minutes before the Sun rises over the Far Side. He presses against the porthole to claim every drop of golden syrupy light. The battered surface drifts below. Craters overlap craters, new on top of old. The back of the Moon bears the scars of the outer face of the Earth-Moon system, the shield of an eon’s meteorite strikes.