Hurtling in the direction of the day after, he turned the corner and nearly collided with another swiftly moving object, in a white lab coat, moving toward the day before. It was Marshak. Yuri hadn’t heard her approach.
Several moments passed, her heels clattering, before Marshak fully recovered from the near impact. She was a tall woman well into middle age, with sallow skin offset by brassy red-brown hair. Her plastic, yellow-tinted eyeglasses were perched halfway down the bridge of her nose. She scowled as she identified him in the murk.
Yuri’s testicles retracted. He set to work concocting a reason for his presence in the infirmary: the need to stretch his legs, a minor headache… He had been in worse scrapes before. This would take some doing, but Marshak would want to believe him.
“Poor Grigoriev…” he began.
“Lieutenant,” she snapped. “Hurry. Where have you been? Come, come.”
She spun on her heels and scurried back down the hallway. For a moment, Yuri wondered whether she had really seen him or was somehow sleepwalking. He decided against pretending to be a dream. He followed her past the door to Room 3, which was closed, but Yuri sensed life—throbbing and abundant—beyond it.
They entered Marshak’s office, a small, wallpapered room with a metal desk, a medicine cabinet, a white plaster bust of Lenin worn almost to featurelessness, and, in a shadowed corner, an examination table. A short, stocky man lay on the table with his shirt off and his eyes wide open.
Yuri cried, “Sergei Pavlovich!”
The face of the Chief Designer, as much of a military secret as his name, was paler than Yuri had ever seen it. It was a handsome, frail face, easily betrayed by suffering. A smile now fluttered weakly across it.
“Yuri,” he whispered.
In alarm, Yuri looked away, at Marshak.
She shook her head. “It’s just angina. I’ve given him a sedative, but he has to calm himself. He’s brought it on through excessive worry.” The Chief Designer tried to make a self-deprecating chuckle, but it came out as a faint moan. “Lieutenant, he asked for you, that’s why I called the cottage. When you couldn’t be found, he became panicked. I thought he would have another attack. And I don’t know where my useless staff has gone to…”
“Don’t worry,” Yuri said to the Chief Designer. “Please.”
“He’s had some kind of premonition. He caught himself whistling indoors. A bird tapped on his window. He passed a woman carrying an empty bucket. He stumbled with his left foot. He discovered that he was wearing one of his socks inside out. Now he wants to call off the flight.”
Yuri bit his lip and reached for the Chief Designer’s shoulder. The skin was clammy and gave off a sweet, nicotine smell. He smoked several packs a day, the most popular brand. It was named after the White Sea Canal, which had been dug by political prisoners.
“No, you can’t call off the flight.”
“I’ve been given too much responsibility,” the Chief Designer rasped. “I can’t accept it, not with my health. It’s not just your life, Khrushchev says the future of the Soviet Union depends on it, socialism, world peace… Khrushchev’s a madman. He’s obsessed by Kennedy. He doesn’t care about space or rockets or science, only about Kennedy. He says we have to fuck Kennedy… He calls me nearly every day, sometimes twice a day… sometimes only to tell me that we have to fuck Kennedy… He expects daily, even hourly progress reports, he considers every stuck valve an act of sabotage. He makes threats, terrible threats. But there’s too much to do, we’re going too fast. We still don’t know why the R-16 blew up or what are the effects of zero gravity upon human physiology. How about cosmic radiation? Or micro-meteorites? Will the retro-rockets fire? We need more tests. We have to send up more dogs.”
“I won’t let a dog fly my spaceship.”
“Who do we think we are?” the Chief Designer asked, closing his eyes. “Is man really destined to leave the earth? Now? How can that be? Have we evolved that far? We’ve barely descended from the apes. We still fight wars and behave unspeakably toward each other. Are we going to take our failings into the heavens with us? What good will that do? We’re not ready for it. Our children won’t be ready either, I’m afraid. Perhaps their children… A generation that hasn’t known war…”
“Please, comrade, calm yourself.” Marshak took his wrist and timed his pulse.
Yuri pulled a stool over to the table and kneeled on it, bringing his face close to the Chief Designer’s. The Chief Designer’s eyes were wet and unfocused, their pupils indistinct. Yuri gripped the Chief Designer’s other hand as hard as was possible without hurting him.
“Look at me, Sergei Pavlovich. We are ready. You’ve told me so. You’ve proven it to me.”
Yuri then spoke for the next quarter of an hour, in a voice as measured as the feed of a fuel line. He recalled everything that the Chief Designer had told him. The need to explore the unknown was intrinsic to human nature. Space flight was the next logical development in human history, as inevitable as anything set down into print by Marx or Lenin. Titov would fly next, then the others, followed by multicrew spacecraft, space rendezvous and docking maneuvers, and eventually a permanent orbiting station, a stepping-stone to the moon and the planets. Kosmograd-1 was already on the design table, orbiting the earth sixteen times a day. Hundreds of cosmonauts would live and work there; women, too. Children would be born in space and soon a way of life would be established there upon completely scientific principles. Perhaps it was only in space that a true communist society could exist, floating free of terrestrial compromise, its economy as finely regulated as its air and water supplies.
Great vessels would ply the spacelanes between the earth and the moon. Man would settle Mars, colonize the moons around Jupiter, explore and exploit Saturn’s satellite Titan. And then the stars would beckon. Man would encounter extraterrestrial civilizations raised by creatures of outlandish biology and aspect, yet their societies would also be subject to the laws of history. Perhaps the extraterrestrials had already reached the final stage of their development. Indeed, because the human race was still comparatively young, living in a universe many times older than itself, it was only logical to assume the technological and social superiority of the extraterrestrials. They would have already abolished economic exploitation, class, national chauvinism, superstition, neurosis, and perversion. There would be much for mankind to learn. But by then mankind would have evolved so far as to be almost unrecognizable to the people of the mid-twentieth century.
“And, Sergei Pavlovich, we shall take the first step, together, tomorrow morning.”
The Chief Designer didn’t respond. He closed his eyes again.
Marshak kept her eyes trained on her watch. Finally, she said, “That’s better. The sedative’s taking effect. He must sleep, that’s most important.”
Yuri nodded. Marshak studied him for a moment. Her expression was soft and distracted.
“You should sleep, too. You have less than six hours. Have you seen the timeline?”
“All right,” he said. “Good night then.”
As he turned to go, Marshak rushed at him. For a moment, Yuri believed that the doctor was about to strike him, that she was the CIA assassin of whom the KGB had warned. Her body, solid and unyielding, slammed against his before he could defend himself. In his gut he received a presentiment of weightlessness. Then she buried her head in his chest through his open flight jacket. She held him for a long time, her body quaking.
“Thank God,” Marshak said at last, lifting her tearstreaked face to him. “Thank God it’s you he chose. Go to her now. She’s in the next room.”
In the next room the drapes were parted and half of Tania’s body was silvered by the moon, like an airplane fuselage on a runway. She stood by the window in an open white robe. In the sharp relief of the moonlight, the illuminated curves and spheres of her figure were disconnected by vast occulted regions, positives and negatives, pros and cons, truths and lies. Her lips, the visible portions seeming to hover in space, trembled and then he himself was seized in a passion of anticipation. He took the remainder of the steps toward her. Tentatively, she reached for his hands, gently clasped them, and even more gently carried them to between her breasts. Her body was warm. Let’s go, she whispered.