Ascent by Jed Mercurio (22 page)

Already a sense of ritual surrounds his approach to the radio. He floats toward it, hoping to see enough of a glimmer in the power lights to put out a signal that he’s here, he’s alive, he’s still trying to hold this mission together. The lights are a row of glassy dots, and blank. He resets the circuit breaker and throws the power. The radio is dead, the ritual concludes. Next he decides to open the communications panel to see if he can identify any burnt-out wiring. He worries he’s wasting time on the radio when there’s so much else to do, but he longs to call out, and longs for an answering call. All the contacts appear intact. The radio’s dead, and he can see no means of reviving it.

To those on Earth he’s lived the commonplace tragedy of seeking and preparing for greatness and then being consumed by death while he remains ordinary. His widow and children will remember him as a husband and father. That is what will be passed on. An ordinary life will be recalled in the ordinary way, its events and meanings simplified to mundane accounts of mundane activities, much as our corpses cannot be assimilated whole, so nature breaks them down to simpler commonplace chemicals.

Once again he endeavors to reboot the flight computer. He follows the steps of the emergency checklist protocol. For over an hour he applies and adjusts the circuit settings but, as he expects, he does so without success. Now he decides he must establish his position. Again he follows a protocol established during training. He floats to the pilot’s control panel and once more is relieved to discover a response from the craft’s attitude control thrusters. This is the only bit of luck in what has befallen him.
Voskhodyeniye
remains his to fly, for the time being at least, and therein lies the chance, however slim, of getting home.

He attempts to arrest the thermal control rotation. Without the computer, his actions are imprecise. He kills most of the roll but the ship’s motion has been infected by tiny germs of pitch and yaw that he can’t eradicate, and he knows he can’t afford to burn kilo after kilo of rocket fuel trying in vain to do so. Like the nagging nausea caused by the wobble, he’s just got to live with it.

Yefgenii draws the blinds on the sunward side of the BO and sets himself up at the sextant. One advantage of the extensive power failure is that there is no pollution from the cabin lighting.

He uses his penlight to study the flight plan, which allows for two midcourse corrections. At this point he must carry out a navigation sighting of five stars with respect to Earth’s horizon. Because it’s so much smaller now, he must add a telescope eyepiece to the sextant in order to identify the substellar point, the nearest part of the horizon to the datum star.

The ship’s wobble still sickens him. He struggles to align the sextant as the device’s superimposition of star and planet pitches and yaws and rolls in the eyepiece, while he braces himself in a half-kneeling position against the bulkhead. Next he reorients
Voskhodyeniye
so he can carry out the same procedure with respect to the Moon. When it appears in the optics porthole, he draws back. It has swollen into a gray globe whose size is unsettling. The Moon has turned in its orbit round the Earth; the face that always points to the Earth — the Near Side, the Earth side — always does so in synchronous rotation, and this face has become more oblique to the Sun. Now shadow engulfs the Sea of Serenity, creeping westward over the Caucasus.

When he’s completed his observations, he reestablishes
Voskhodyeniye
in the thermal control maneuver that rolls the capsule three times every hour. The new rotation is as contaminated by pitch and yaw as before, but of a new character. He finds the altered sense of jumbled motion difficult to adjust to, having become accustomed to its previous components. He needs to put a vomit bag to his chin. He retches, but nothing comes up. He retches again and this time regurgitates a small clump of food paste and gastric acid, which he spits into the bag. He hovers as still as he can manage. Eventually the motion sickness remits to a tolerable level. He packs the vomit bag into the waste management system, to be jettisoned into space.

Yefgenii compiles his stellar observations and then works with log tables to determine his position. The combined calculations of the onboard computer and those at Mission Control would produce the answer in a matter of minutes, but by hand and mind the process is as difficult as Gevorkian predicted. It consumes three hours.

He takes a break for rest, fluid and food. As he swallows the paste he hears his bowels gurgle. He feels a motion, then more pressure in his rectum. Again he decides to postpone defecation.

His pencil scratches out the final calculations on his thigh-pad. Papers spread in front of him, floating in an array over the flight plan. The flight plan contains sample reference calculations so he can judge with some certainty the accuracy of his own conclusions.

He fears the dysfunctional translunar injection has failed to propel
Voskhodyeniye
into the designated free-return trajectory, or the venting of gas from the ruptured tank is acting like a small rocket and pushing the spacecraft off course, but his own observations show the spacecraft’s present translunar coast appears closer to nominal parametres than he dared hope. With no further deviations, he’ll slingshot round the Moon and back toward the Earth in a figure eight.

Pushing away from the porthole, he drifts to the environmental control system. Air flows, but chills his hand. The heating has gone offline. For a moment he considers what this means. The permutations cross and conflict. He pushes them aside. The spacecraft can work in cold, for the time being at least; a man too.

He must decide whether or not to carry out the first midcourse correction. It’s the only way to keep alive the possibility of attempting a Moon landing. However, his own survival is much more likely if he abandons this element of the mission now and concentrates all his efforts on returning safely to Earth.

Yefgenii sets about making the calculations based on how far off the nominal course he’s gone since translunar injection. Again, the flight plan offers reference figures to guide him through the intricate process, and he uses the log and trig tables compiled for the purpose.

For a brief interlude his mind revisits the orphanage in Stalingrad. He remembers the lessons in mathematics, where he learned the rules by which the physical universe works, and first set out on the quest to ascend.

When he completes his calculations, hours have elapsed. He judges that the original observations are now out of date, and so he repeats them all, by stabilizing the spacecraft’s motion as best he can, remeasuring the positions of the datum stars, and feeding the more current information into his calculations, working as fast as he dares without leaving himself open to error. The reinstatement of the thermal control rotation, crucial now that the cabin heating is nonoperational, nauseates him to the point where he vomits acid and bile from an empty stomach.

Yefgenii drinks water to soothe the burn of vomit in the back of his throat. He drifts in the middle of the BO. He is cold now. The layers of his flight suit are too thin for insulation. He shivers as he considers his situation.

Carrying out the first midcourse correction will establish a greater probability of a successful lunar orbit, but will expend fuel he might want to conserve for a complex reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The chance of a successful landing is even slimmer than it was at liftoff. By all operational rules of spaceflight, his course of action should be to preserve the free-return trajectory and maximize the possibility of getting home alive.

Yefgenii arrests the rotation of the spacecraft to all but a tiny wobble. He must carry out the course correction by firing the lunar lander’s Block D engine. He operates the engine from the control panel in the BO. It will fire only if the electrical connections remain functional and the explosion hasn’t caused any internal damage to the LK/Block D system.

The Block D engine fires.
Voskhodyeniye
bucks but he holds her steady. His manual control is effective. He times a nine-second burn on his wristwatch before shutdown. The engine cuts out on command.

He tries to sleep, but he can’t. He’s put the spacecraft into a new thermal control rotation but it makes him feel sick. He decides to repeat his stellar observations to ensure the engine burn has achieved the course correction he calculated.

Voskhodyeniye
turns. He views the Earth and the Moon. He’s weak, cold, weary and sick, but he’s alive, and still flying, and therefore he can still dare to believe that both worlds remain his to conquer.

HE BEGINS THE FOURTH DAY by attempting to purge the fuel cells. Most of them are dead. The lox leak has caused a loss of pressure in the system, and as a fail-safe the valves supplying the fuel cells have shut. He speculates that not all the fuel cells have been starved of oxygen, either because not all the fail-safes have operated as expected or because intermittent pressure fluctuations have been causing the valves to open. In any event, the fuel cells are supplying a dribble of electricity to
Voskhodyeniye,
sufficient only to power the essential flight-control systems.

Something else troubles him even more. The fuel cells combine hydrogen with oxygen to generate electricity, but as a by-product they yield his water supply. Already he’s dehydrated. He judges there’ll be barely enough water to meet his needs for the remainder of the mission.

The cold has become unbearable. Its fortunate coincident effect is to reduce his need for water, but he must put on the Orlan space suit for insulation. First he accepts that this is the most convenient time to evacuate his rectum. The pressure is intense now.

He removes the lower portion of his flight suit and attaches a fecal collection bag to his buttocks by means of an adhesive strip running round the rim of the bag. On the morning of the launch, a VVS nurse shaved the hair from his buttocks to make this process as comfortable as possible. Once he’s ensured the adhesive strip holds fast, he releases the contents of his rectum into the bag. Without gravity, the stools don’t fall; he must use his fingers through the plastic of the bag to coax them down. He seals the bag, wipes, seals the wipes in a second bag, and stows them all in the waste disposal unit.

Wearing the Orlan, he feels warmer, but his face and head remain chill. His breath coils in vapors.

The spacecraft plunges toward the Moon. The target floats into the photographic porthole and Yefgenii decides to take a picture. In its mount, the camera studies the object that has swollen from an ivory disc to a giant gray globe. He peers through the viewfinder and keys off a series of images. In its last quarter, the Moon is a perfect hemisphere, divided into a radiant gray-brown west and a black east. It’s no longer flat to the eye. Its belly bulges toward him like the prow of a battleship at anchor on a surging tide.

He snaps off half a roll of film and then, on impulse, releases the camera from its mount and turns it on himself. He’s hovering, the metal rim of his space-suit collar looping round his chin, his jaw stubbled, his eyes blue and sleepless, his scalp bald. This is the image he captures, not knowing if it will ever be seen, if it’ll ever adorn the front page of newspapers or the leaves of history books.

In contrast, the crew of
Apollo 11
was announced at the beginning of the year. They became household names because their flight was slated to be the first attempted Moon landing, and the success of
Apollo 10
confirmed the plan: Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins will fly to the Moon in the second half of July, and, if they secure lunar orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin will attempt a landing in their lunar module, and, if they succeed, Armstrong as commander of the mission will take the first steps out onto the surface.

Yuri Gagarin’s identity and his mission weren’t announced till he returned. Before him, a cosmonaut called Valentin Bon-darenko died in training for the first manned spaceflight. The facts were hidden, documents were locked away, his name remains unknown. And so, by now, the announcement of the failure of the
N1-5L
unmanned test will have been circulated beyond the inner circle. Possibly Western intelligence will acquire the information, or at least some meaningful part of it. Yefgenii Yeremin has gone the way of Valentin Bondarenko: there follows a shuffling away of papers, a closing of vaults, a state secret will be created and eventually forgotten; the world will turn without another nod to his life or his death.

Next comes the effort toward complete erasure. The widow must be sworn to secrecy. She will never be permitted to bear her married name again, nor her children their true family name. She must swear by the official truth, that her husband served with the VVS and his life was lost in training; he never entered the cosmonaut corps, never took on this last greatest mission. And Gevorkian, he must swear too, and Ges, all his colleagues in the cosmonaut corps. The military men will do so without question. They know how to keep a name alive, in whispers late at night in the officers’ club, after many vodkas. The secret toasts may survive a generation, that is the best he can hope for.

He anticipates that for a deception so important the authorities must go even further. A senior official will travel to Graham Bell. He’ll sequester any logs pertaining to Kapetan Yefgenii Yeremin. He’ll trace any man who served with him, and convince him of the national interest to be served by complying, and the reprisals that will result by not. Perhaps it will be the same official or a different one who will confiscate the relevant logs of the 221st IAP, and that same official or a different one who’ll find the men who are still alive, the Pilipenkos and the
starshinas.

To the people of Earth, Ivan the Terrible never existed. Now it might be easier for him to pretend that Earth doesn’t exist, that
Voskhodyeniye
is the universe, and he the only consciousness in it, a great being sailing through the cosmos.

Yefgenii feels a sudden profound longing to speak to his children. He sees their lives projecting into the future without him. He’ll live in their memories for a time, but the authorities will confiscate the photographs, their recollections will fade, they’ll be urged never to speak about him. He yearns to tell them where he is and describe these visions to them in detail. Only human beings can transmit a culture to future generations that exists beyond the material written in our genes. It is as if he understands this for the first time, where we live, and what we are.