Within days, the plague of A-bomb sickness will spread.
Those closest to the hypocenter will develop petechiae of various sizes, hemorrhages of tiny blood vessels in the skin that look like discolored spots. Their skin under the rash of purple spots will turn an unnatural hue. Their white blood cell counts will fall.
Now that the bomb cloud has gone back to where it came from, crickets crawl out of hiding and chirp incessantly to express their disturbance, wondering what has happened to the world above ground. Insects and plants are already planning to spring up and flourish. Frogs, too, hop around, croaking loudly in the soot and dirt, knowing something is amiss.
Once the air shocks are over and the fireballs gone, homeless dogs prowl among the ruins, while mosquitoes and flies gather in growing swarms. Like the vandals and gangsters already making plans, they’re preparing to move in on the vulnerable and to take over the city, reveling in the disorder that war brings.
And the frogs better hop away because they’re going to be hunted as a delicacy for the atomic survivors, selling for up to fifty yen apiece if captured.
“Enola Gay” has gone home.
Survivors are still flocking for refuge to Ninoshima. Some provisions are there: food, water, bandages, ointment, some medicines.
A young officer of the Japanese General Staff is dispatched to Hiroshima to find out what’s happened after communications with the city were broken. When the plane is about 100 miles from the city, he and the pilot see a great cloud of smoke left from the bomb blast as well as fires burning all over the city. Far beneath them are tiny crawling processions of refugees. Trams and motor vehicles are burnt-out shells, as in a war zone. He also notices corpses bobbing on the river.
Miraculously, shrubs and plants near the center of the explosion are still living, although stripped of leaves. After a few days, they’ll be pushing out buds, as the river flows on down to the bay from the mountains, as it has always done.
O, Hiroshima, let darkness come to hide the terrible remains of this day. Only if morning comes, will we know for sure the world hasn’t ended.
III
THE SPACEMAN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AFTER THE DARK FORCE, there was a period of peace. Earth could breathe again. Then, within a few short years, history set aside a young pilot with a beautiful smile for a secret spaceflight.
Not even his mother knows he’s about to become the first spaceman. Only his wife has the inkling he’s undertaking a solo voyage into the cosmos above the sky.
If all goes according to plan, the man, whose name is Yuri Gagarin, will cross the threshold of space, using rocket power to race beyond Earth.
Wearing his orange pressure spacesuit, with a white, air-tight helmet brandishing the letters С.С.С.Р. above its visor, Gagarin is travelling on the cosmonaut’s bus towards launch Site 1 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. He’s brimming with his customary enthusiasm.
Hundreds of kilometres of new road and train lines span into the space port. To the immediate south, the Syr Darya River, fed by snow and glacier melt from high mountain regions of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, winds its way westwards towards the gigantic lake of the Aral Sea. As the transporter rumbles along the highway across the sparse, southern plains of Kazakhstan, the cosmonaut can make out in the distance the silvery hull of the Vostok 1 rocket gripped to its launch tower.
The Cosmodrome, its launch facilities carved out of the semi-arid Kazakh Steppe, has become the frontier of human progress, a place where giant rockets are assembled and prepared for lift-off into the heavens.
Gagarin is vaguely apprehensive yet undaunted by what lies ahead in the next few hours. As the ground staff help him to suit up, some of them pass him pieces of papers to sign, realising his autograph will, in time, become sought-after and valuable.
After all, he’s about to become a celestial aviator, the first human in outer space. His mission is to give some hope back to humanity after the catastrophe of Dark Force.
Although the Cosmodrome is the world’s first operational space port, it is already part of history. Four years earlier, the Sputnik 1 satellite, intended for study of Earth and its surroundings, had been successfully launched from the site. The word Sputnik means ‘fellow traveller’ and, suddenly, mankind and machinery seem to have joined forces in a frontal assault on space.
Satellites in space: a harbinger of humans in space… This time, the rocket, with its six engines, packing a total thrust of twenty million horse power, will shoot a human payload into orbit. As early sunlight splashes over Vostok 1’s aerodynamic head, Gagarin sees the machine as the beacon of a scientific future, one free from oppression, rid of dark forces of mass destruction.
When the first batch of cosmonauts had visited the main construction area of the OKB-1 design bureau just ten months earlier, the rows of space capsules, in various stages of production, electrical wires hanging in all directions, had bedazzled them. Immediately, the pilots had recognised that the strange space technology they were seeing went far beyond anything they knew about aviation.
They were witnessing the birth of a new kind of world.
It is Wednesday, 12th April, 1961, deep in the hinterland of the U.S.S.R. and it is quite impossible for anyone to know if this space mission will succeed.
The weather is crisp, dry and windless. It is just after the melting of the winter snows in Central Asia. High in the sky, a few fleecy clouds drift around, as if unsure what to do on such a bright spring day.
Within a few hours a modest 27 year-old man, born into Russia’s peasant class, and who has never been out his own country, will become the first human to leave the bounds of Earth.
The bus parks next to the rail transport lines alongside the launching platform and flame trench. The spaceman disembarks. The vast open spaces in this forlorn part of the world are conducive to radio communication systems linking his flight to Ground Control. Two impressions immediately strike him: the enormity of the rocket stack above him, tinged with a sunny glow, and several anxious faces of scientists, engineers and state officials, each blinking in the glare, waiting at ground level to welcome him.
He’s warmly greeted by the Chief Designer, Sergei Korolev, Russia’s larger-than-life aerospace engineer and pioneer, sporting his customary open-necked white shirt and sports jacket. Korolev is like a father-figure to him, stern but good-natured, intense but caring.
He’s a stocky, strong-looking man with a jutting jawline. He dresses and lives modestly, not interested in the trappings of power or wealth. His high forehead seems to announce an impressive intelligence, while his broad shoulders and frame underscore his personal and professional authority. And he always seems to be in a hurry, trying to make things happen, a born innovator and achiever.
Today, though, the middle-aged rocket scientist can’t quite hide the worry on his face. Often, he has a mischievous, knowing glint in his dark brown eyes but, this morning, they seem to be almost black, intensely concentrated. He knows that any mistakes during the launch and subsequent flight will almost certainly cost the likeable young cosmonaut his life. There’s enough chemical power in the fuels alone to blow the whole rocket to kingdom come.
Korolev’s life has been difficult and it has certainly toughened him. Recently, he’s felt his body ageing, losing strength, giving him more trouble than ever before after years of stressful, high-powered work and political manoeuvring at the cutting-edge of Soviet space technology.