Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight (7 page)

I unstow the camera and snap
several photographs of the earth. If everyone back there could see what I
saw…well, surely it would change some thinking. I pay close attention to filter
settings, taking comfort in work and artistry. This at least is something I can
do well.

•••

I suppose I should talk more
about this, in case you don’t already know: I do truly love photography. I
know—you’re probably laughing. I can imagine you thinking: “What does that say?
Everyone loves photography. That’s like saying you love sunshine.” I know, I
know. I suppose I should clarify that there are two types of photographers:
those who spend time in the darkroom—who invest the time to learn the chemicals
and the master the processes—and pretenders. And I’m no pretender. I don’t mean
to give offense! It’s just that there are levels to these things.

It’s a bit funny, of course—I,
who love taking pictures, ended up on the other end of the lens more often than
anyone. I’m not trying to boast here! If anything, I’m trying to offer some
friendly advice, to warn you: be careful of what you love. I don’t know if you
believe in God or not, and I’ll leave it to your imagination how I really feel
on such matters, but I suppose I’ll say that whatever your beliefs, whether you
believe in scientific causes or divine retribution or fate, you should at least
appreciate the circularity and the irony of certain things. So be careful of
what you love. It will be your undoing.

And perhaps you want to know more
about me? I can say this. Venyamin and Alexei, the KGB agents who keep tabs on
me during my various appearances: they are my best friends. You might find it
sad, or shameful, depending on your beliefs. Then again, you may feel it’s
patriotically appropriate! Is it because I don’t want them telling other people
what I’m doing—to keep them keeping my secrets? Is it a normal human reaction
to close proximity over a long period of time in a variety of stressful
situations? Is it because I’m simply that innocent and that naïve? You can make
of it what you will.

(I will say this: the greatest
shrewdness of all is to appear to be innocent. To seem blameless, humble—even
ignorant, at times. People are comfortable with ignorance and simplicity. It
may annoy them, but there’s some satisfaction in that—it also lets them feel
superior, and who doesn’t like to feel superior? At any rate, it never
threatens.)

My favorite book is actually
American. I suppose I can say that now. Hemingway,
The Old Man and the Sea.
Granted,
nobody who reads can really have a favorite—it’s like asking a person to name
their favorite breath of fresh air, or telling a parent to pick their favorite
child. Indeed, I’m partial to a lot of books. Jack London, H. G. Wells. And of
course Polevoi,
The Story of a Real Man,
which was my introduction to
Maresyev
.
This is the book I always tell people is my favorite. How can
you not be impressed with a story like that? Such sacrifice, such courage.
Surely everyone of my generation—myself included, of course—must feel humbled
by such a hero. And of course, it was a handy answer in many conversations.
Relatively predictable, certainly nothing that would rock the boat or cause
anyone to revise their opinion of me downward. A safe pick. But there’s
something I love about that Hemingway. A real man, too, a hero, and yet not
triumphant, for few heroes are. There is struggle everywhere in life, not just
in epic battles with fascists, but also in an ordinary battle with a fish.
There’s struggle everywhere, and nobility in the struggle. (Although perhaps I
don’t believe that, after all. Perhaps that’s one of those unchallenged
assumptions, the things we think we believe until we actually examine the
contradictory facts. For if I really believed in the nobility of the ordinary,
I would still be in Klushino, tending the soil! I would not have learned to
fly, I would not have been the first man in space, I would not now be heading
for the moon.)

Still…Hemingway. There’s an
openness, a space in that book. Something that so many other authors fill in,
out of fear you won’t understand what they’re getting at. With Hemingway there
is this space, and the book is like a vessel. You can pour yourself into it and
make it yours. That’s something Blondie and I talked about, the very first time
we met, in fact.

So I’ve misled people about the
end of East-1. And I’ve even misled people about something as trifling as a
favorite book. So, again, perhaps you’re wondering how you can believe me now?
Perhaps you’re thinking: “How do I know he’s even on a solo mission? Perhaps
there’s a second cosmonaut in there with him.” Well, I’m the only one telling
this story.

People don’t want truth, anyway.
They say they want it, of course: it sounds good. But what they really want is
reliability. Stories are trimmed and sanded and shaped to fit some purpose.
Surely they lose some truth in the process. But before that happens, they are
shapeless and without form. And how can something without form have a function?

And of course, this is a type of
war, and in war there is deception. During the Great Patriotic War, there were
charades on all sides. The British and Americans built fake armies of plywood
tanks, used actors playing Churchill and Montgomery so as to throw the Germans
off about their true whereabouts, sent corpses washing ashore with false
papers. Nobody has a problem with such lying, as long as it’s done by their
side. There is a certain eagerness to see it all revealed at the end, to have
someone say, “This, at last, is the truth. It was too dangerous to tell it
before, but now it can be revealed.” But it’s like the thrill of seeing a
conjuror’s tricks: the early deception is forgiven. And that’s what I can say,
regarding my earlier evasions: This, at last, is the truth.

•••

My chronometer tells me it’s 5:45
p.m. in Moscow—early in the evening of October 27
^th
, 1967. But I’m
246,000 kilometers from Moscow, in a place where absolute time has little
meaning, other than as a scheduling convenience. What really matters up here is
relative time, mission elapsed time. Man/hours of oxygen consumed, time
remaining until reaching the moon, and so forth. And it is at last time for the
midcourse firing.

Pavel Popovich was manning the
radio for a spell around lunchtime, but now Blondie is back on the control
panel. “Well, you haven’t made the papers yet, Yura,” he says. “White Tass says
the English have picked up some transmissions from a Soviet craft headed for
the moon. But they’re speculating that it’s another exercise. Taped
transmissions from a mannequin.”

I chuckle. “I’m not that boring,
am I?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m a bit
biased.”

“If only they knew we’re actually
talking via radio relay,” I say, for the benefit of anonymous Western ears.
“I’m back in Star City, transmitting to the spacecraft, which then transmits
back to you in Yevpatoriya. It’s all an elaborate communications exercise.”

Blondie chuckles. “That must be
it. You’re far too funny to be a mannequin.”

(I imagine them listening in:
Englishmen and Americans, snooping all over the globe. Am I resentful of their
hypocrisy? Am I jealous because we don’t have their resources? I’ll leave that
to your imagination.)

“Well, there will be more to talk
about anyway, soon enough,” I reply.

“We are going to have you try the
100-K again prior to the burn,” Blondie says. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll do a
sun-earth alignment.”

“Very well.”

I strap myself in to the launch
couch. It’s not like I can get that far away from it—again, the ship isn’t all
that roomy—but I have been floating during my waking and working hours.

“Confirm you are on the lowest
filter setting,” Blondie says.

“Confirmed.”

The stars are, relatively
speaking, fixed in their courses—at least from our perspective. Singular
points, far away—exactly what you’d want to use to determine your orientation
in three-dimensional space.

Again I press the buttons. Again
the spacecraft swings about. Again: nothing.

Since this business started with
the 100-K, my unease has been growing. I know I should be on a free-return
trajectory, but given the error figure they mentioned, I have my doubts. And
even if I am headed back towards earth, the reentry corridor’s just thirteen
kilometers wide; at lunar distances, that’s rather small, indeed.

But it’s also a long way off. We
need to do this first.

“We’ll go ahead and do a solar
align, then,” Blondie says.

I page through the binder. A
different sequence of buttons: the checklist will keep me straight. I press
them in order and the craft swings about. With the sun and earth and moon, it’s
less precise: on such a large body, you need to agree on where you’re sighting
and taking measurements, or accept a certain level of error. Still, it works.

“Alignment successful,” I say.

“And now we will transmit the
burn sequence. We will start at mission elapsed time 2 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes.
Burn duration: 29 seconds.”

I pluck my pencil from the air
and write the figures down in the checklist logbook. The burn will happen via
ground control, but I need to be prepared to cut off the engine manually.

“I copy 2 days, 5 hours, 47
minutes. 29 seconds of burn. Confirm you will execute on that mark.”

“Confirmed.”

The timer climbs.

The engine fires and I settle
into my couch briefly, but the spacecraft shakes violently. After three
seconds, the engine stops.

In my stomach there is a
tightness. I force myself to take a deep breath. The worst thing a pilot can do
is panic. We will work through this.

“We do not have a full burn. We
do not have a full burn.”

“Cedar, this is Dawn-2.
Confirmed. Incomplete burn.” Blondie sounds cool and professional.

“It lasted three seconds, and
there was a lot of shaking before the engine shut off.”

“Understood. Please check all
switch settings, Cedar.”

I recheck the lighted pushbuttons
to see if some incorrect switch up here could have terminated the burn. But I
can’t see anything wrong. Everything is as it’s supposed to be.

“Dawn-2, Cedar. I have confirmed
all my switches. How do you want to proceed?”

There is a delay. Presumably they
are conferring. Then: “Cedar, we will attempt another burn in 2 minutes. Same
duration.”

The time passes slowly. As the
saying goes, there is nothing worse than chasing or waiting. After the interval
is up, I ready the stopwatch and the engine fires again. Again comes the
vibration. This time it shuts down after two seconds.

“Incomplete burn, incomplete
burn,” I radio.

The engine, the S5.53, is a
simple device. Another hypergolic contraption, with plain valves controlled by
redundant electrical relays. There are no ignitors, even. When the valves are
opened and the Devil’s Venom is mixed, it explodes. There is no logical reason
why it should have stopped. But it stopped.

Still, I am confident we can
correct our trajectory.

“Dawn-2, this is Cedar, do you
have a plan to do another burn?”

A delay. Then: “Sorry, I’ve been
speaking to Mishin. They’ll spend the night looking at the data and we’ll try a
burn tomorrow morning when we’re back within relay range,” Blondie says. “In
the meantime, get some rest and conserve your thrusters.”

“Very well.”

In the meantime I wait. Again, I am
confident. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. There is no point in
getting worked up.

I eat dinner in silence. Watching
the light move as the spacecraft rotates, it occurs to me that I need to
fashion some sort of cover for the broken porthole shade before my next sleep
period. And since the first sections of my mission checklist binder—the ones
relating to de-orbit procedures prior to leaving earth’s orbit—are now useless,
I remove those and fold them until I have smallish squares of paper. Then I
wedge these impromptu nightshades up against the glass.

I try to fall asleep. Nothing.

I pride myself on my willpower,
but sleep is perhaps the area of human endeavor least susceptible to the will.
Less than death, even, for that can be hastened through force of will, if one
is of that mind. Whereas sleep is the complete absence of will. Then again,
there are pills of various sorts…

My thoughts fall apart like
nesting dolls. Different parts roll around until they are mismatched. East-1,
looking down on the cloud tops from orbit. The Nedelin Incident, tales of
inferno, burning men running from an exploding rocket. Sergei Pavlovich’s
funeral, public recognition at last for the truly indispensable hero of our
space efforts, his ashes in the Kremlin wall. Playing on the couch with my
daughters. The moment after Foros when I woke up in the hospital, hearing
stories of my fall.

I fall asleep.

I wake up.

Is this a dream? No, it can’t be.
When you are dreaming you don’t know you’re dreaming, but when you’re awake, you
know you’re awake. And to create confusion between the two is a tactic for a
third-rate storyteller, which I am not.

I try not to look at the timer. I
tell myself that, if I don’t see it, I won’t worry about how much sleep I have
or haven’t gotten.

I fall asleep.

I wake up.

•••

You probably haven’t heard about
the Nedelin Incident. I should perhaps tell you about that in the meantime. It
is a state secret, but not as important as it used to be, and it will help you
better understand my story.

The story of our country’s space
triumphs is the story of its strategic rockets. It’s this way in America, too,
of course—the Atlas that launched John Glenn was a weapon of war, as were the
Titans of Gemini. The Americans like to pretend otherwise, to act as if these
two purposes of rocketry aren’t related! But advances in one turn into
successes in the other, just as surely as potential energy is transformed to
kinetic.