Mars fumbled along the wall to the light switch, placed at more than an inconvenient distance from the door. The padded walls sucked up all sound, so this period between closing the door and lighting the room felt purgatorial, a kind of nonexistence. How the twins in space described their experiences.
Orange-white light flickered from the overhead lamps, revealing the radio console, more than three meters long, but the only thing on it was a keypad, a single red button, a small round speaker, and a microphone on a metal gooseneck, all situated just left of center. Mars keyed in the code to activate the system. The speaker crackled, fizzed with static, whined like a sick dog, and then settled into mostly silence, broken only by the occasional pop of interference.
As Mars’s ears adjusted to the faint sounds, he picked out something like humming amid the ambient hiss.
He pressed the red button and spoke into the microphone, “Leonid, is it you?”
“I never learned music.”
“I can tell.”
Leonid hummed again, an atonal tune, if it could even be called a tune, a sound somewhere between singing and mumbling.
“What do you call it?” asked Mars.
“Shit,” said Leonid.
Mars laughed. He pressed the red button and laughed again so Leonid could hear it.
“You made a joke,” said Mars. “Did you ever joke before?”
“I’ve been practicing. I’m not sure whether it’s to amuse myself or to try to elicit a laugh from the empty space all around me.”
“Any luck so far?”
“I feel dull and space remains silent. You know, none of the training prepared me for the silence outside Vostok. The capsule itself will make noise, the flow of air, creaks, several thuds that I was sure were the sound of the thing coming apart. But from outside, absolutely no noise. It’s like the anechoic chamber, but a thousand times more quiet. I guess it was just as quiet in the chamber, but there was still something outside. Could it be psychological? Did I know, even in the silence, that the microphone in the chamber connected me by wire to a room just a few meters away? What connects me now? Some incorporeal wave of cosmic energy, beamed from you to me and back again. Even if I were small enough to worm my way through a wire, I couldn’t ride the infinitesimal crests of the waves that connect me to the planet.”
“We’re with you, comrade.”
“I know, I know. I simply regret that I’m not also with you.”
WITH TRAFFIC, the trip from Moscow to Star City had taken the Chief Designer almost two hours. The sun glared in the side window the whole time, and he had sweated through his shirt. His driver apologized over and over about how long it was taking, as if the man were actually an automaton programmed to speak just that one thing. As if the driver controlled the route of every car on the road. While the Chief Designer had spent much of his life casually shuttling to and fro in aircraft, a simple car ride left him exhausted. At least in a plane he could get up and move about. The plasticky scent of the car’s interior coated him like a slick.
Star City’s campus had grown from a small huddle of low buildings to a sprawling complex complete with several towers. The dormitories came into view first, thirteen stories high, bare bricks of concrete and glass, the concrete already turning a shade of dirty brown. These three towers seemed to sprout from the middle of the forest. As the car got closer, the whole campus came into view, lower buildings arranged according to no plan that the Chief Designer could decipher, laboratories, offices, training facilities, and a few structures he had never entered and had no idea what they might contain. He would have to ask Mishin and Bushuyev, but if the Chief Designer was honest, he did not much care. He tried to ignore what he did not absolutely need to know. It was easier that way.
The whole complex grew lush with trees, left unfelled at the Chief Designer’s insistence, the only clearing a long quadrangle on the other side of the dormitories from the main training facility. The original plans had called for clear-cutting the whole area. The Chief Designer, though, had spent too many years in the treeless tundra. He argued that technology was not meant as a way to escape nature, that space exploration was not about leaving the Earth behind, but that humanity would one day fill the cosmos with what Earth had to offer. His driver parked the car in the billowing shadow of a tree. The Chief Designer got out and stretched, flexing the kinks out of his legs.
He tracked Mishin and Bushuyev down in the training facility, where young Giorgi—attached to so many wires and tubes that he seemed more machine than human—ran on a treadmill. The muscles of Giorgi’s bare chest pulsed with each pump of his arms. His hair, even during the most strenuous training, kept a perfect part, as straight as the white line on a blueprint. His stride was casual, his breathing even.
“How long has he been going?” asked the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev exchanged a glance.
One of them said, “We stopped keeping track after an hour.”
“An hour!”
The Chief Designer looked back at Giorgi. Maybe he really was a machine. But even better. None of the Chief Designer’s machines functioned nearly so well.
Giorgi saw the Chief Designer and waved, raising the tangle of wires attached to electrodes on his arm. He smiled around the clear plastic tube clutched in his mouth. Giorgi was always grinning, and the expression only grew the harder he ran. On the monitor, the Chief Designer watched Giorgi’s pace increase while his heart rate remained the same. Giorgi’s feet struck the rubber track toes first, his calves bouncing him back up as if they were loaded with springs. Tap tap tap tap tap. His steps landed with the consistency of a metronome.
The rest of the equipment rested unused, metal frames like the bones of prehistoric beasts. The gyroscope, which looked like a cross between a medieval torture device and a model of the solar system, rings hinged one inside the other, the innermost jutted with handles and footholds to secure the cosmonauts as technicians set the whole contraption spinning along several axes at once, dominated the center of the room. Its only function was to test how a cosmonaut handled dizziness. A circle had been cut in the carpet around the gyroscope’s base. It had proved much easier to clean vomit from bare concrete than from the fabric of the carpet. Giorgi, though, had never been sick even once during the training.
The room had three white walls and one, opposite the door, covered with a detailed mural depicting the faces of the first four cosmonauts and a glorified version of the R-7, the painting much prettier than the actual rocket, like the propaganda illustrations Ignatius distributed to the press. There was already the outline of a fifth head, which the Chief Designer assumed would soon become that of Leonid. The mural had been Giorgi’s idea and was the product of his own talents. On his first day at Star City, he had entered the training room, looked around once, and declared, “What a drab place! Chief Designer, surely you’ll let me beautify it for you.” The Chief Designer hrmphed, not agreeing but not outright forbidding it. That was enough for Giorgi, who the next day, when he had a free minute in the rigid training schedule, managed to acquire paint and brushes and laid the first few streaks of color in a room that for half a decade had been nothing but white and gray. The scent of fresh paint merged with the room’s usual stench of sweat.
There was a time when the whole room would have been full of cosmonauts in training, each strapped in and wired up, surrounded by a hive of buzzing technicians. The original five cosmonauts, sometimes their twins, and then Giorgi, yet to launch and twinless. The Chief Designer’s youngest and best cosmonaut candidate yet. The Chief Designer regarded him like a son, loved him like he had no one else since…