“Not as much sway as you believe. If I had my way every time, OKB-52 would not exist, but here you are, and with a title superior to mine. As is the case with most who declare themselves victims, you’re only a victim in your own mind. You’ve had nothing taken from you, and yet you declare loudly all your losses. There’s a significant difference between losing and not having yet received. And didn’t Tsiolkovski teach us all that the best way to preempt loss is with sacrifice?”
The General Designer dipped his head and rubbed a spot just above his eyebrow. He had been closer to Tsiolkovski than the rest of the Soviet rocketeers. For most of them, Tsiolkovski was like a minor god, but for the General Designer he had been like a grandfather. To mention Tsiolkovski was gamesmanship, the sort of cheating the General Designer had accused the Chief Designer of at the beginning of the meeting. Had it been anyone else, the Chief Designer might have felt ashamed.
“Have you seen him?” asked the General Designer.
“Not in years,” said the Chief Designer. “I hear he’s moved to a mountain. Like some sort of oracle. That’s what we all thought he was, anyway.”
“It was 1960, the last time I spoke with him. He was already… untethered. He’d stopped talking about space, fixated instead on selective breeding or something like that. It was hard to follow. It was hard to watch such a great man slipping. Have you received any letters?”
“No, but you were closer to him.”
This denial was a lie. After Nadya’s launch, Tsiolkovski had indeed sent a letter, shakily written in blue ink. The message was half incoherent, but here and there a flash of the old master shone through. For instance, Tsiolkovski had known without being told that Nadya’s ship had burned up on reentry. He had begged for the Chief Designer to apologize to the other Nadya for him. The Chief Designer ignored the request. Apologies from Tsiolkovski were so long overdue as to be meaningless. And though Tsiolkovski had first found the twins, had viewed them as little more than lab rats to test the effects of space travel upon, it had been the Chief Designer himself who decided the twins’ final fates. Tsiolkovski had less to apologize for than he believed.
The Chief Designer opened a report on his desk, the one he had been flipping through without actually reading.
“If you’re to assist me,” he said, “then here’s what I need. Continue your projects, and if you have something that will help me, I’ll ask for it specifically.”
“You’re asking me to continue?”
“I already have a staff, General Designer. I don’t need a second one.”
“Don’t come to me later asking me to build you a rocket.”
“As if I would trust any rocket that you built. Do you know why Khrushchev asked you to help me? It’s because of his dog. He wants me to send his dog into space.”
“Byelka?”
“You know it?”
“An obnoxious animal. I visited the Premier’s dacha once and spent the whole time trying to keep the thing from mounting my leg. He wants to send it into space? Maybe you could leave it there.”
The General Designer laughed, a short deliberate sound. The Chief Designer followed suit.
“I don’t like you,” said the General Designer, “but I appreciate that you didn’t send Khrushchev to me. Assuming that’s the truth.”
“It is. You have an engine test for the Proton next week? Perhaps I’ll visit, though I don’t trust hypergolic fuels.”
“You’re afraid of them. Ours isn’t an industry for cowards.”
“Nor one for fools.”
“And yet it seems to attract them. I suppose I’ll see you soon.”
“It’s unavoidable.”
“Gah! How little of our own fates we control. That mine should be bound with yours.”
The Chief Designer stood, rounded his desk, and opened the dark-stained door. He waited there until the General Designer was out of the office and down the hall. Mishin and Bushuyev watched him from their twin desks, one on either side of the room. The Chief Designer slammed the door shut. The old solid wood thudded in a way that pleased him. A well-made thing performing as it should. It was a feeling, he realized, that he seldom enjoyed anymore.
MARS HAD MOVED a cot into the radio room. The cot was surplus from the army, Mars suspected from the end of the war, given to Star City before the dormitories were built, back when the cosmonauts slept in the gymnasium, separated from each other only by thin sheets hung from wires. Yuri’s snores would echo through the room like the launch of a thousand rockets. Mars had thought more than once to smother Yuri in his sleep.
The cot, coming apart at the joints, creaked whenever Mars climbed onto it, but if Mars lay still, the radio room descended into a kind of silence he had never known before. At least outside of the anechoic chamber. There, though, the silence was artificial. That silence was designed to drive a person mad if it could. The only ones ever to come out of it after an extended stay and still have their wits about them were Nadya, the one who survived, and Giorgi. The first thing Giorgi did after he emerged was play a game of table tennis, as if the tok-tok-tok of the ball did not sound a thousand times louder.
Mars tried to remember Leonid’s four-week stint in the anechoic chamber. After he got out, Leonid seemed disoriented and talked only in whispers. The sound of a footstep could make him jump. He once said that food tasted different, as if sound affected his sense of smell. The loudest noise in the chamber was always one’s own chewing.
And now Leonid had been in isolation twice as long as that. The second month came and went, and he still breathed and still spoke, and back on Earth, Mars took turns with the Chief Designer, Mishin, and Bushuyev to talk to him. The Chief Designer had forbidden any of them from telling the other Leonid. He said he did not know how the news would be taken. Leonid’s grief had already come, and there was no use making him reprise it. Mars doubted the logic behind that decision, but what was one more secret to keep?
Mars almost never left the radio room, sleeping there even when one of the others was on shift. He did not explain why, and no one asked. He was not sure exactly why himself, but he had a suspicion. For every other twin, he had been the last person to speak to them. With Nadya, he had wished her luck before the radio blacked out on reentry. He had waited and waited, for hours after it was obvious she was lost, until the Chief Designer physically lifted him from the console. With Yuri and Valentina, he had pressed his ear to the speaker in order to hear the faintness of their last breaths. And with his own brother he had recalled memories that he had not thought of for years, back to an impossible time when they were still together.
Mars did not want to miss the last words of Leonid. He felt it was his duty to hear them. To the public he was a cosmonaut hero, but to himself he was the hearer of last words. That was his only purpose, the only thing he had left worth doing.
He rose from the cot and turned on the radio. A clock hung on the far wall, but he did not consult it. He had internalized the timing of Leonid’s orbits and could place himself at the console within seconds of the first staticky hello from the capsule. The speaker crackled, like a type of echo that preceded the sound it mirrored, and then came Leonid’s voice, raspy, the dryness of his mouth and throat audible.
“Hello?” said Leonid. It was always a question.
“I’m here,” said Mars.
“Hello, Mars! Did you know that your name is also the name of a planet?”
“I think that’s why Tsiolkovski chose it.”
“Sometimes I think I’ve spotted it, the planet, but the window is small. More than likely I’ve only seen another star.”