The thought of his last cigarette redirected his attention toward the infirmary, about 200 meters across the scrub. Its white clapboard showed gray and ghostly in the dark. At one of its corners a red light winked. He gazed at the electric bulb and his sense of anticipation became tumescent. Tomorrow: space. Across the darkened American sky, he’d be a light himself. He had always known he would be the first, it was a matter of wanting it badly enough. Already he felt consumed by expectation, pride and, and…
A smile crossed his face. Desire. He winked back at the electric bulb.
Descending from the porch, he found the ground hardened from the cold. A few frozen twigs snapped, but otherwise his passage across the empty field was without weight or sound. He was not afraid, he never was.
Deliberately overshooting the infirmary’s entrance, he set an elliptical trajectory around the building, past the surgery. Most of the windows were draped or shuttered, but through them drifted soft romantic music from a radio or a phonograph. A radio, he decided, detecting the echoing signature of skip-distance reception.
Beneath his returning arc, behind one of these windows, lay the infirmary’s single resident patient, Grigoriev. A victim of the R-16 blast, with burns over 90 percent of his body, he was too ill to move and too ill to recover. Grigoriev had been a candidate-cosmonaut, among the most promising in the nimbus of candidates below Yuri. Yuri respectfully tipped his head as he passed the window of what he believed to be the patient’s room.
He came to a large undraped window at the end of a hallway. Its polished wood floor reflected a yellow streak of light. He paused there a moment before moving on to the next window. Its blinds didn’t reach all the way to the bottom of the frame. The room was unlit save for the indirect glow reflected from the hallway, like earthshine softening the lunar night. Something stirred in the room and left it. He glimpsed a nurse’s white uniform, but couldn’t determine to which nurse it belonged. Several were on duty at any given time. He had seen only the girl’s back.
Gradually he apprehended a storeroom: cardboard boxes, a shelf of beakers and tubing, and a wall lined by folded linen. With eyes that a famous song would someday say were as keen as a hunting dog’s, he noticed that the side of the window sat unevenly against the frame, not fully in its embrace.
Grinning, he pushed against it and swung the window open on its hinges. He heard footsteps and pulled away. Someone came into the storeroom. Standing among the sparse weeds outside the infirmary, his back to the clapboard, Yuri couldn’t guess what she was doing, only that her hands were too full to turn on the light. He gazed across an unplowed field and felt a rising, accelerating excitement. He heard the nurse step away again, humming along to the radio music: “What Moves My Heart So.” He turned just as her ankle disappeared around the door. By its slender, sinewy musculature, the ankle declared itself to be Tania’s. In a single, effortless motion, as if he were already weightless, Yuri lifted himself up and through the window.
Tania returned a minute later, contemplation sharpening the features of her petite, triangular face. From deep within the storeroom’s shadows, where Yuri lurked like an undersea creature, her olive complexion seemed even more oriental, her eyelids even flatter. And everything about her face was in perfect proportion, almost isoscelean. Yuri never failed to be astounded by the totally anonymous beauties harbored in these remote Soviet provinces.
With a languor redolent of the Tatar centuries, she placed some folded towels on a pile of linen and reached for something on a shelf above her head. For an extended moment the line of her body, from the balls of her feet through the flex of her ankles and the sweep of her legs, buttocks, and back, was a perfect curve, a single quadratic running through the dark. Yuri waited until she returned to earth before he stepped from the shadows.
The nurse gasped and clutched a spool of bandages to her chest. Another spool dropped soundlessly to the floor. The discomposure of her expression was like the shattering of crystal, which in the spectacle of its disintegration revealed new aspects of its intrinsic beauty.
“Lieutenant!”
He raised a finger to his lips, approached, and then laid the finger against hers.
She recoiled as if struck.
“We must be quiet,” he whispered.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. Her almond-shaped eyes were as dark as the sun was bright. “What do you want?”
“Tania, Taniatchka, relax. I’ve just come for a little visit. Shhhh.”
“How did you get in here?”
“Shhhh,” he said, placing his finger again on his lips and then, very gently, on hers. This time she didn’t pull away. Heat radiated from the translucent labial flesh. He hadn’t been wrong: her single, shyly appraising glance the other day and a slightly lingering touch this evening when she applied the telemetry strip had told him all that he had needed to know.
“Listen, I’m leaving Baikonur tomorrow. In the most extraordinary way. Shhh. Don’t speak, Tania. Let’s not speak at all.”
He removed his finger from her lips and then returned it, pressing more firmly. She kissed it, almost reflexively, but not quite reflexively.
“But what are you doing here?”
He put his arms around her small body, slightly lifting her. The embrace was gentle, the power of his arms merely implied.
“I’ve come to say good-bye.”
A giggle escaped. “Here?”
He ran his hands up her sides. Her body shivered beneath them. It was just a meter or so to the soft wall of linen. With sure, insistent pressure, he danced her back. Her eyes misted and her resistance slowly deliquesced, until the moment her bare calves scraped against the towels. Then she froze and slid from his grasp.
She whispered, “Are you crazy?”
“The doctors say no. I’ve been tested.”
“We can’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“In the storeroom? Yuri, I can’t. For God’s sake, you can’t!”
“I can.”
“Marshak’s here!” she hissed.
Yuri was taken aback, at least momentarily.
“This late?”
“All night. It’s because of the launch. She’s in her office.”
Tania moved away, but his hands reached out and touched her wrist. His hands didn’t close, it wasn’t a grab, but she couldn’t bear to move away. And, besides, his foot was against the door.
“Well,” Yuri said. “Then you surely can’t go. Look what I’ve risked coming here.”
In the stiffening of her facial expression and the clearing of her eyes, he witnessed the physiological consequences of her blood running cold. Yuri himself was not unnerved by the contemplation of the risk, even though it was a little like talking about a plane crash before a flight. For the hundredth time he recalled the moment a few hours earlier when, hunched over the electrical leads, Tania had worked on his chest and the top of her uniform had opened and fallen away, an act of delicious sabotage. Her brassiere had been loose and ill fitting, nearly spilling her breasts, each as round as a planet.
His arms now encircled her again. He pressed his body hard against hers and felt her yield.
A buzzer went off. Although submerged in their kiss, Yuri recognized the low, rasping moan at once: the booster rocket’s first stage release indicator. He picked his head up and again heard the signal, down the hall. This buzzer and the one for his rocket had clearly been supplied by the same military contractor in Chelyabinsk.
“I have to go,” Tania said breathlessly.
“Where?”
“That’s Grigoriev, he wants something. I’m on duty.”
“Come back, I’ll wait.”