Nadya took her place beside Leonid, and the roar exploded, louder still. She would always be the favorite. Russia’s first daughter. The Soviet ideal personified. The only noise to which Leonid could compare this new cheering was the launch of a rocket. The platform trembled beneath him.
When Khrushchev finally took his place alongside the cosmonauts, the cheering had abated somewhat. He did not seem to mind that there was no new ovation for him. He smiled wide and squeezed Leonid’s shoulder over and over. Several random generals shook Leonid’s hand and then Nadya’s and then waved to the crowd.
Khrushchev produced a slim felt-covered box from his inside jacket pocket. He opened the lid, revealing the glinting pentagon of a medal, Pilot Cosmonaut of the USSR. Khrushchev plucked the medal from the box as if picking a flower. It was such a tiny thing, thought Leonid, but Khrushchev held it up to the crowd as though it could be seen even from the far reaches of Red Square. Leonid had seen at least one person in the crowd with binoculars. Gripping Leonid by the lapel, as if he were about to take a swing at him, Khrushchev deftly pierced the pin of the medal through the fabric over Leonid’s chest, in and then back out again, and secured the pointed end in the clasp. Khrushchev stepped to the side and took Leonid’s arm and raised it. A new wave of cheering. Besides the man with the binoculars, Leonid doubted that anyone there knew exactly what they were cheering for.
Someone gripped Leonid’s arm and pulled him away. It was Ignatius. She had changed clothes, and now wore the uniform of an air force officer, freshly pressed, the blue unfaded. He tried to identify the medals on her chest, an ostentatious showing, but he did not recognize a single one of them. Sometimes he thought of adding random strips of fabric and scraps of metal to his own uniform to see if anyone noticed. Ignatius continued to pull him down the steps. A black Volga sedan waited near the bottom.
“You have a winning smile, comrade,” she said.
He touched his face and felt the smile there. He did not much feel like smiling. He willed his face to relax.
“I thought you were an agent of Glavlit,” he said, “not an officer in the air force.”
She tugged at the sleeve of her uniform. “You know better than any the importance of appearance. I simply… borrowed this uniform so I could blend in.”
“It suits you more than it suits me.”
She opened the door to the Volga. Nadya passed between them and entered the car first. Her uniform showed signs of wear, the fabric pilling, unable to hold a crisp crease. She had worn it for probably a hundred appearances. The uniform alone might have traveled farther than her sister’s single orbit.
Leonid looked back over his shoulder. The crowd crested toward him, like it would overwhelm the mausoleum, sweeping away the car and him and Nadya and Ignatius and Lenin’s waxy corpse. He wanted to join the crowd, blend his face with a thousand others. He wanted to be a blur. If he stepped into the throngs now, there was no way Ignatius could follow. He would shed his uniform jacket. He could hear in his head the sound of the medals impacting the concrete. But where would he go? Where could he? For a moment, he envied his brother.
“Get in the car,” said Ignatius. “The public isn’t done with you yet.”
He stooped into the car and sat beside Nadya. Ignatius closed the door from the outside.
THE CHIEF DESIGNER was not allowed to display his medals, dozens of them at this point, stored instead in their original boxes in a footlocker back at Star City. He wore a plain tan suit and a white shirt with no tie, huddled with a few of the other engineers beside the platform, trying to accept the roar of the crowd as his own even though not one person there knew who he was. Sometimes his title ended up in Pravda, but never a name, and certainly not a picture. What a joke of a newspaper was Pravda. What truth did it ever report? Still, he was happy. The cosmonauts were like his children, and of what is a father capable if not pride?
Mishin and Bushuyev stirred beside him, grumbling something, one of them to the other, though he could not tell which had spoken.
“What is it?” asked the Chief Designer, but he saw the answer even as he asked.
The General Designer strode in front of the mausoleum, directly below Leonid, before all the cheering thousands. He was a tall man, equal in height to the Chief Designer, though only half as broad. His gray suit was cut wide in the shoulders, forming points like a hanger was still left inside. He shuffled his feet as he walked, barely lifting them for each step.
His gaze fixed on the Chief Designer. Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, muttered a curse and the two walked away. The General Designer stopped and faced the Chief Designer, standing much too close. His breath, tinged with the meaty scent of a recent meal, blew across the Chief Designer’s face.
“Another success,” said the General Designer, shouting to be heard over the crowd and the band that played an endless loop of “Aviamarch.”
“Nothing less,” said the Chief Designer.
“But what’s next? Surely even you must grow weary of these endless orbits.”
“The Earth has been orbiting the sun for all of human existence, and no one complains about that.”
“I think you equate your own complacency with that of everyone else.”
“Of all the things I’ve been called, this is the first time I can add complacent to the list.”
The General Designer leaned in and spoke the Chief Designer’s real name, a name he should not have known.
“You won’t long be the only star in the sky,” said the General Designer, “nor the brightest.”
The Chief Designer grasped the upper arm of the General Designer and pushed him away, holding him at arm’s length.
“The Americans are already there,” said the Chief Designer, “and that’s the only competition I care to consider.”
“As do I, comrade,” said the General Designer. “But ask yourself, are you really the one in the best position to win it?”
The General Designer shrugged off the Chief Designer’s grasp and strode back in front of the mausoleum. He stepped into the crowd on the other side. The Chief Designer watched his head bob in and out of view until he lost sight of it.
Mishin and Bushuyev stepped forward.
“What a dolboeb,” said one of them.
“Doesn’t he have a point?” asked the Chief Designer.
“You’re a Soviet hero, Chief Designer. Until the General Designer’s rocket launches, until his capsule reaches the moon, he’s nothing but a pretender.”
“We pretend, all of us,” said the Chief Designer, and then to himself, “that the only ones who know my name should be adversaries.”
He thought just then of Leonid. Not the one here on Earth, but the one still in orbit, the one whose every breath drew him nearer to the last. That was a real hero. One without body, survived only by his name.
THE CAMERAS FLASHED as soon as Leonid entered the room. He paused just inside the doorway and blinked away the spots, only to have the first round of flashes followed directly by another. The photographers, snapping pictures every few seconds, stood along the back wall of the room. In front of them, in low wooden seats, sat the reporters. The seats looked as if they had been made for children. Leonid’s hand waved without him having to think about it.