Ascent by Jed Mercurio (16 page)

Yefgenii underwent intensive preparations at the Cosmonaut Training Center. The physical challenges were tougher than those given to fighter pilots. Now he was a man in his thirties. The stresses hurt him. They stretched his stamina. He needed to adapt to new techniques and learn the engineering of vehicles different from any form of aircraft he’d ever flown.

He adapted. He was a quiet man who listened to instructions. He studied each operation in detail. He analyzed how he could make a technique more efficient or more precise for himself. The technicians noted his improvements. In the simulators, his decisions were quick and accurate. He was always calm, always austere and remote, but this was the hardest work of his life, the steepest hill yet. He dared not show a splinter of strain.

The cramped seats and capsules were designed within payload weight limits. Every gram was crucial. He was nearly a foot taller than Gagarin and his height caused him endless pain, in his knees, in his shoulders and worst of all in his back, but his weight was the greater trouble, because it might exclude him from a mission. He began to refuse the widow’s meals, with the excuse that he had to work or that some training exercises were best carried out on an empty stomach. He was becoming like a jockey, light for his height, lean and hard, always hungry.

He made parachute jumps. The pain shot from the base of his spine down his legs but, minutes later, despite a residual ache, he took on the next piece of suffering. He couldn’t tell anyone, couldn’t ever show, or that would be the end of him.

While the widow put the children to bed, he studied technical manuals. After what supper he might or might not have eaten, he would return to them; hours later, she’d declare she was going to bed, but he’d carry on, into the night, reading fine print till his vision blurred, his stomach aching with hunger.

It reminded him of the orphanage, of the mathematics that had launched his trajectory. That drive he’d found in himself, what he was capable of, this was something he had to find again. The sky above was black, but not with the oppressive clouds of a city in ruins; this was the blank open canvas on which a man could blaze like a comet.

Gevorkian informed Yefgenii they were throwing a New Year’s party at OKB-1. Only a handful of cosmonauts were invited, but he was to be one of them, at the personal request of the Chief Designer.

Hundreds of people filled a vast hall decorated with balloons. Outside, fireworks banged and blazed in the night. Ges led him to the buffet table. Champagne bottles stood in rows behind a glinting array of flutes. Ges chatted with fellow trainees while Yefgenii drank straight away to settle his nerves.

He observed the Chief Designer near the band, laughing with Gagarin and Leonov. Then a woman in a ball gown asked him to dance. The Chief Designer obliged and they spun off across the dance floor. The women were elegant and admiring. For the cosmonaut corps, there were always such women.

Komarov joined Gagarin and Leonov. He was a grave older man, a senior test pilot, the command pilot of
Voskhod 1,
which had carried the first three-man crew. These men had missions behind them. They were a breed apart from those who’d trained for space but had never flown. They glowed. They were themselves celestial objects.

Gevorkian approached Yefgenii, poured himself a glass of champagne. He studied the nervousness in Yefgenii’s expression. “I’m just a genius,” Gevorkian said. “You’re a legend.”

Gevorkian led Yefgenii across the divide to Gagarin. Gagarin greeted them with a broad handsome grin, this celestial man as great as his nation. He was the most powerful living symbol of Soviet achievement, the most famous pilot in history. His name would live longer than countries.

They toasted the New Year. Gagarin ate canapés. Like the small men, he never worried about his weight; physical exercise would keep him trim. Yefgenii watched the tasty morsels of food passing Gagarin’s lips. He declined them, suffering hunger pangs.

The Chief Designer returned. Now a cosmonaut, Yefgenii was permitted to know his name. “S.P….” said Gevorkian.

Sergei Pavlovich Korolev disregarded Yefgenii’s pseudonym. “Kapetan Yeremin,” he said. “How are you finding our enterprise so far?”

“It’s my honour to participate, thank you, Sergei Pavlovich.”

“Now you’ve joined us, I have the team to beat the Americans.” He threw an arm round Yefgenii’s shoulders. Yefgenii was taken by surprise. He felt awkward at the physical closeness. He worried the Chief Designer was drunk.

Korolev continued, “I’ve dedicated my intellectual life to achieving firsts. The first satellite, the first probe to the Moon, the first man in space, the first woman, the first three-man crew, the first EVA. You beat the Americans all those times in Korea, Ivan the Terrible. You beat their U-2. Now you’ll help us beat them to the Moon.”

He beckoned Gagarin, Leonov and Komarov. His gestures were flamboyant. He was a leader, and more, he was a magician. The three cosmonauts joined in. Korolev hugged them as he’d hugged Yefgenii, kissed their foreheads. Yefgenii saw he wasn’t drunk. He was brimming with life and ambition. “Come the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution,” he said, “two of you will be orbiting the Moon.”

Korolev raised his glass again, and so did the cosmonauts. The magical Chief Designer had swept away Yefgenii’s doubts about the future and his own role in it. Yefgenii grinned and threw his glass in the air, as much a part of the enterprise as any other man.

A few weeks later Korolev was dead. He’d gone into hospital for routine surgery and they’d found a tumor; he bled; his heart and lungs gave out on the operating table; then it was Komarov, piloting the first
Soyuz,
who became the first man to die during spaceflight when the parachutes failed after reentry; and a year later it was Gagarin, killed on a training flight when another aircraft near-collided with his MiG-15. If any man’s life had been synecdochic of his nation’s, it was his; Yuri Gagarin was the Russian DiMaggio. Even he could be taken, even he, the immortal.

IN A RUSSIA WITHOUT GAGARIN, the air seemed colder, the skies emptier. Something had been lost that was impossible to define. A clock had ticked on the mantelpiece and the occupants of the room had remained oblivious till the second the ticking stopped.

Yefgenii Yeremin rose before dawn. He drank milk to bloat his aching stomach. He ate eggs to feed his muscles. Outside the apartment building the streetlamps of Star City glowed yellow. They were lines pointing to infinity.

He followed the column of trees to the end of the avenue and then increased his pace, beginning a familiar circuit of the city. His breaths blew clouds that hung in the air for an instant before vanishing. He glided past offices and laboratories. Barbed wire bounded the perimeter, beyond it thick woods. Sentries turned as they heard him coming. Their guns swung round then down-pointed. The guards saluted the cosmonaut as he ran past.

Twinges began to prod his chest. His arms felt heavier. His back ached. This was the run home, the push, the pain.

In the apartment he showered. He was quiet, so as not to wake the children. The hot water eased his back. He stretched taut sinewy muscles. He weighed himself. In the mirror his ribs showed, his belly caved in; his iliac crests protruded.

The widow met him in her dressing gown. She insisted on cooking a full breakfast. She was worried about his weight loss; she knew the reason for it, but she feared for his health. He surrendered. He ate the heavy breakfast of sausage and bacon. Later he vomited it up.

That morning the cosmonauts were advised of a restructuring of the training groups. November 7, 1967 — the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution — had passed, Korolev’s deadline for a pair of Soviet cosmonauts to orbit the Moon. The program was paralyzed by his death and its vehicles were grounded following the loss of Komarov. But the Americans weren’t flying either. At the start of the year, a fire during ground testing of the
Apollo 1
Command Module had killed Gus Grissom and his crew, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, necessitating a lengthy technical review of the Apollo spacecraft.

Korolev’s successor as Chief Designer had been his deputy, Vasily Mishin. In the time since his appointment, the corps had learned that he preferred the spacecraft to be automated and a cosmonaut to take control only in the event of a catastrophic systems failure. Engineers had been selected to become cosmonauts. Medical criteria had been relaxed to admit them. Korolev had had his favorites too — Gagarin, of course, and Leonov — and Yefgenii had sensed he might have come to be held in the same regard. While Korolev had placed his trust in the daring of fighter pilots, Mishin was more impressed by technical expertise. Engineers with little training had replaced experienced cosmonauts in mission selection, and then in just as precipitate a fashion this decision had been reversed by the Space Committee. Training groups were formed, restructured and reformed depending on who was favored, pilot or engineer. That morning, it was announced the cosmonauts were required to sit for an examination.

Yefgenii cleared his mind of all distractions and concentrated on pushing himself through the pain. When the test came, he scored highest. He understood the technical particulars of the spacecraft as well as any engineer; his mathematical ability cruised him through orbital mechanics. The corps was divided in two, one group assigned in three-man crews to the Soyuz vehicle and rendezvous-docking operations in Earth orbit, and the other assigned in pairs to fly the two-man Zond spacecraft to the Moon.

Mishin didn’t give Yefgenii a slot. He favored an engineer.

Gevorkian called at the new apartment block that had opened the previous summer. Yefgenii swam in the pool whose construction had been overseen by Gagarin himself. In this first summer without him, the summer of 1968, the N-1 booster rocket was behind schedule, the LK lunar lander was still on the drawing board, they were launching unmanned missions in automated Zonds but no men from the USSR were flying to the Moon.

Yefgenii Yeremin felt it in the thickness of the water, how they’d fallen behind for the first time. His thin limbs were heavy, they didn’t scissor through. He rolled from front crawl onto his back. A film of water flowed across his face and, when it cleared, the face of Arman Gevorkian was peering at him from the poolside.

“Comrade Mishin’s approved the backup assignments at last.”

Yefgenii continued to backstroke. His long arms turned in slow arcs, water falling from them in fine curtains.

“The backup lunar pairings have been agreed. I’ve been selected as a flight engineer.”

“An engineer. Of course. Congratulations.” Yefgenii reached the end of the pool, turned and switched to front crawl.

“The crews have to be weight balanced, the heavier men paired with the lighter—” Gevorkian scampered along the poolside to keep up, but Yefgenii ducked his head under the water.

When Yefgenii reached the shallow end, Gevorkian was waiting. “Please fuck off.”

“I asked for you. He said yes. You’re the pilot.”

Yefgenii stood. Water streamed off his bald head, off his shoulders and chest. His long lean body glistened. A smile burst like the Sun.

They trained in the centrifuge at CTC, the biggest in the world. They practiced carrying out reentry procedures while being subjected to 9, 10, 11 g. They travelled to the planetarium in Moscow and spent hours learning the constellations. To learn the stars of the southern hemisphere, they flew to Somalia. They ventured into the desert where under a clear black sky they pointed sextants into the heavens. The Moon hung overhead. It no longer lay beyond reach.

In September an unmanned Zond travelled to the Moon and back with a pair of tortoises on board. Gevorkian said, “Of course Mishin chose tortoises — he is one,” because, despite the success and a subsequent rendezvous of Soyuz capsules in Earth orbit, they were still focusing on reentry problems.

By now the lunar crews were in place. The manned Zond, the L-1, would be flown first by Leonov and Makarov, then Bykofsky

and Rukavishnikov, then Popovich and Sevastyanov, all partnerships of command pilots and flight engineers, with Yeremin and Gevorkian as one of the backup crews: three missions would loop round the Moon and return to Earth, and then one crew would be selected to return in the L-3 spacecraft and attempt a landing.

It was Wally Schirra who led America’s first Apollo flight, an orbital test of their Command Module. Then came reports the Americans had modified Apollo. Fearing a Soviet circumlunar flight and suffering delays with their Lunar Module, they moved up their first circumlunar attempt and began mounting a manned flight to the Moon using only the Command Module of the Apollo spacecraft. Meanwhile yet another Zond was launched, again unmanned, again it experienced minor reentry problems, again the men who were ready to voyage to the Moon were ordered to stand down.

Frustration and resentment rippled through the cosmonaut corps. These men wanted to fly. They accepted the risk. Yefgenii as much as any man understood that. When the eyes of the cosmonauts met, they shared the look of men whose days were burning by. Battling the Americans had become introspective and claustrophobic. The open sky had shrunk down to the intense compartments of a capsule simulator or a centrifuge, of aircraft cabins and water tanks.

Yefgenii Yeremin continued to train. His back ached from a wearying day in the simulator. He concentrated on the tiniest movements of his hands, on the position of switches; he shifted in a hard little seat inside a cramped metal box. His limbs were hard rods; his torso was narrow and bony. Every hour he craved a heavy meal. When the pangs of hunger became too intense, he’d binge and vomit.

He knew a way onto the roof of the apartment block. The world expanded around him. City lights swamped the lower portions of the sky but the stars above shone in patterns that for the first time in his life he could recognize and name. A cosmonaut wasn’t a true cosmonaut till he flew in space. The single act transformed him from the human to the celestial. Portraits of Gagarin hung everywhere, more than when he’d lived; a new street, a new building was named in his honour almost every week. His life and his act were part of history, they lived in the narrative of the species. Tomorrow would be another day of training, another day in the box.