Ascent by Jed Mercurio (21 page)

He clambers out of the hatch into unfiltered sunlight. The roll of the spacecraft caused by the Block G explosion has oriented the hatches toward the blinding yellow disc. The space suit’s protective layers shield his body from the unattenuated radiation, but, as Yefgenii slides along the tethering line, he begins to feel a scorching pain in his side. He concludes that one or two layers must have torn as he fought to right himself during the earlier violent toppling movements. Now every panel of the spacecraft’s hull beams burning UV light at him.

The thread of frozen gas coils from the damaged lox tank back toward the diminishing Earth. This time he is determined to reach the tank in the simplest manner. Gathering in the tether, he floats on past the LOK hatch and aft toward the power module, and now begins to let out the tether with the correct timing to stop it from snapping taut and springing him back or out or whichever wrong way.

Yefgenii manages to ease himself into a small turn, angling his scorched side away from the Sun, and feels a sudden drop in heat and pain. He drifts to the tank and at close quarters inspects the crack in its casing like a crack in an eggshell. One small puncture vents the oxygen. The gas freezes in an instant. The sight is strange. He feels he is watching snowflakes form; he is watching the processes of nature laid bare.

He presses his glove over the puncture. He is able to mend small punctures in his suit with a repair kit and this is the only means at his disposal for attempting to contain the lox leak. He removes his hand to reveal a plaque of ice that pops open with the pressure of gas behind it, the plaque shattering into shards of crystals.

Yefgenii opens the repair kit. In looking down into it, he enters a very slow tumble, which he corrects by throwing his free hand out onto the hull. He bounces off and tumbles in the opposite direction. He feels pain tear at the scorched section of his skin and then, as it turns into the Sun, he feels it light like a fire. He screams in pain but fights not to oppose the rotation. He lets it hurt and then it passes as his body rotates into its own shadow. He brings out the sticky patch from the repair kit and struggles to hold it between fat swollen inflexible fingertips. He is unable to manipulate the patch and unable to uncover the adhesive backing, his fingers are too fat and rigid in the space gloves. He keeps on trying. He is tumbling end over end and he is getting sick, but he keeps struggling to get the patch into a form he can use to stem the leaking lifeblood of his spacecraft, but it’s beyond him, it’s beyond any man, and the patch slips from between his fingers and he lunges for it, but the gloves are too thick and rigid and he is now turning in the wrong direction, turning to the Sun again; this time, when the sunlight strikes, he can’t hold back, he emits a deep primal roar that fills his space suit and reverberates through every layer and joint of it but in the vacuum of space travels no farther.

HE FEELS THE HEAT OF THE SUN on his body, the solid band of light that divides the BO into day and night. Soon the sunward portion of the spacecraft will overheat and the shaded side freeze. He returns to the pilot’s seat and straps himself in. He sets and fires a thruster.
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jerks into a slow roll, but, without the computer’s assistance, he can manage the maneuver in only an imprecise fashion, so that the spacecraft’s rotation is skewed by small amounts of pitch and yaw. He’s trying to get the whole stack turning, the LOK and the docked lander, but as a result
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is also wobbling. He feels something in his stomach, the subclinical nausea experienced in an aircraft flying out of rudder trim, but he’s done the best he can, and, as the stack rolls, the solar heating is distributed over its shell with an approximate uniformity. He’ll have to live with the nausea.

When he pauses to take stock, he becomes conscious of the agony of his sunburn. A scarlet triangle has blistered and tightened on his flank. The spacecraft carries no dressings or ointments; not another gram of weight could’ve been added to the launch payload. He must take water to avoid dehydration; he must keep the lesion clean to avoid infection. The pain he can only endure.

Out of a porthole, Yefgenii sees that the debris that shook loose when he jettisoned the Block G engine has now drifted clear of the spacecraft. The Block G itself glides about 500 metres behind, no longer shedding small showers of ice, and nearby float the staves of the payload shroud that resemble the leaves of a tulip curling open to the Sun.

He searches for the trail of vented gas. The ship continues its slow roll, and this is how he eventually gets to see it, as the sunlight rolls onto a gentle curving arc of ice crystals threading out from somewhere on the spacecraft and trailing away into space. The tank is still venting. No measure at his disposal can stem the leak. He’s losing the raw material from which
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’s fuel cells generate electricity, water and oxygen.

The mission is almost certainly lost. He may never get home. He feels deep, depressing failure. Time is sliding by.

A single act can define the meaning of a man’s life. Everything to this point has been a rehearsal. The boy who ascended from the ruins of Stalingrad to the realm of space, the man hardened by cold and exile, this man has longed for the clash of metal against metal in a sky gleaming with beautiful machines, the climactic clash of cymbals of the two greatest powers in history. Like Gagarin, he has become his country. More: a hand drifts in front of the Earth framed in the porthole, and covers it. In space, a man is the size of countries. He must act, he must do what no one else could achieve. Throughout his career, he has craved a mission such as this one. Now he has it.

Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin unstows the emergency procedures checklists and begins to follow the protocols, using his penlight when the rotation of the craft transports his section of the BO into darkness, and bringing the metal blinds down when the Sun comes in, leaving just a crack of attenuated sunlight that sprays through the cabin.

He identifies which of the spacecraft’s systems are functioning and which are not. The environmental control system, which oxygenates and purifies the cabin atmosphere, is working. The flight-control systems are working when governed manually. The flight computer has crashed and is not recovering when rebooted. The communications system is not functioning.

This task carries him through to the end of his second diurnal cycle in space. Because of his absorption in work, he’s missed his food, fluid and rest breaks. He has made himself ill. His sunburn is agonizing. He is hungry, but hunger has become a moral ally in recent years: it reminds him he is disciplined, he will push himself farther than the ordinary man. He is dehydrated, but gulps of warm water renew him. He’s tempted to press on, but he is too weary. He opens the plastic pouches and metal tubes and consumes cubes of cheese and borscht in the form of a bland chewy paste. He needs to urinate again. His piss is an even deeper yellow. When he jettisons the waste into space, it doesn’t stream toward Earth; instead the crystals glide on the gentle escarpments of gravity, neither toward the planet nor away from it. One day, the ice may be captured by Earth’s pull, but till then it’ll drift in this cislunar space for countless centuries.

A little of the drinking water he lets out into the air. It forms a perfect sphere that wobbles and drifts in front of his eyes. He captures it in a cloth and lays it on the patch of sunburnt skin that forms a bright red triangle on his right flank. He winces. Every movement hurts. The cloth applies dampness for a mere moment, then, without gravity to hold it in place, it drifts off into the cabin. He snatches it and wrings out a tiny drop that hangs in the air for him to swallow. Then he sets aside the pain and returns to work.

According to the flight plan, now is the period to use any spare time for photography.
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’s rotation is imperceptible apart from the creep of Earth and Moon across the portholes. Yefgenii keys the camera mounted in an optical port and shoots a series of images of the Earth setting and sometime later the Moon rising.

The Moon is waning gibbous. The Sun lights its surface from the west as far as the Sea of Serenity. His eyes rest on the Ocean of Storms, an ancient lava field stretching to the western limb of the lunar disc. Within its bounds lies the landing site selected for the mission, on a basalt plain about 500 kilometres west of the crater Kepler. These features are clearer and larger than he’s ever seen. The Moon is growing, though he knows he must be decelerating. The Earth’s pull is slowing the ship down but won’t ever quite stop it crossing the gravitational ridge into the Moon’s influence, and then the Moon will draw him in, ever faster.

Behind
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the Earth is shrinking. Now it’s small enough to be banded by the porthole’s metal frame.

Yefgenii knows he is presumed lost. On Earth, his colleagues must consider the most likely explanation: that a catastrophic explosion occurred during the burn of the rocket engine. He pictures Gevorkian conveying the news to the widow, or perhaps another cosmonaut that she’d know, like Ges or Leonov. She remained at home with the children as he made final preparations at Baikonur, forbidden to attend Mission Control because it’s bad luck to lay eyes on a woman, except of course if she’s a technician. The night before liftoff, he went through the rituals, “for luck,” of transferring to the small house where Gagarin spent the night before his flight, of taking a sip of champagne with breakfast, of pissing on the wheel of the bus that carried him to the pad. An official telephoned her with the good news: liftoff was successful. He imagines she wept with relief. She hugged the children to her chest. The next call came: successful orbit, but then nothing. So there she is, in the apartment, as Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it falls to, informs her they’ve lost contact with
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There’s another knock at the door. It’s Ges’s wife, perhaps; another cosmonaut family will take care of the children, just for the time being. The hours crawl by. The telephone rings with a sympathy call from a senior space official, Mishin himself or perhaps even Kamanin, who assures her that everything possible is being undertaken to secure her husband’s safe return. She knows that minute by minute the technicians are endeavoring to make contact with the spacecraft; not only are they hearing nothing from the pilot, but also there is no relay of electronic information from the ship’s systems. This is explained in gentle terms by Gevorkian or Ges or Leonov, whoever it is. An abrupt termination of telemetry signifies a catastrophic event befalling the spacecraft. The timing, the association with an engine firing, in an undertested propulsion system assembled in haste, all these factors together mean they must fear the worst. Of course, she asks if it might be something else, and of course they say, “yes,” but their voices are low and their eyes carry little conviction because a systems failure on the scale that would eliminate total telemetry would in all likelihood also render the spacecraft inoperative. The mission is lost. The craft is lost. Major Yefgenii Mikhailovich Yeremin is lost.

The widow wants to be brave, but she weeps for her dead husband. The space officials too are sorrowful, but now they must address the question of how long to wait before issuing the statement planned in the event of such an outcome, that the N-1 blew up during an unmanned test on July 3.

He knows his name is being expunged from the records. He pictures the documents relating to his false identity being further falsified to show that he was discharged from the cosmonaut corps. They will go back, he imagines, to his flying records and his war records, and they too will vanish. The paper shreds, it burns. The photographs curl and blacken to smoke.

Yefgenii attempts to sleep. He unfolds the narrow metal frame to which he must strap himself, for fear of floating about the BO and causing injury to himself or his craft. He pictures the children asleep in their beds. In the morning their mother will tell them the story. He wonders if they’ll shed tears, or be numb, as he is numb now, numb and sleepless, watching a solitary globule of water, his tear, drift and ripple and from time to time glint in the light of the Earth and the Moon.

WHEN HE WAKES, he wonders for a moment where he is. The first thing that comes to mind is that he is a major now. General Kamanin awarded him the rank, at the extraordinary meeting of the Space Committee, in which he volunteered to pilot this mission designated
N1-5L Soyuz-7K-L3-1.
Kamanin asked his reason, and he replied, “To prove the superiority of the Soviet system.” He has made such statements so many times in his career that he may even have begun to believe the words, but in one matter there’s no question of self-deception. He loves his country, and he aims to see it again.

He feels cold and he’s uncertain whether the cabin temperature has dropped or it’s because he’s just woken from deep sleep. His chronometer shows he’s entered the third day of the flight. He can’t believe he fell asleep. His worries seemed too great.

Empty space fills the portholes. He searches for the trail of vented gas but either the sunlight isn’t striking the crystals or the tank has emptied. The Earth has shrunk again. Soon it won’t be much bigger than the face of his wristwatch, yet it remains so bright, much brighter than the most radiant full Moon.

Stubble roughens his face. His mouth is dry. He takes on water then he urinates. He consumes a portion of food concentrate. His bowels move, but the rectal sensation is only of partial fullness, so he prefers to postpone defecation.

Every movement tugs the taut skin of his sunburn; he feels it crack and ooze. He’s made a dressing by cutting out a small section of material from his flight suit. Blood and discharge stain the dressing black and yellow. He cannot further damage his flight suit nor risk expending water to wash the wound. The dressing remains in place, held by pieces of tape, melting into the burn, damp and reeking.

Hunger and dehydration accentuate his weakness. No man has travelled so far out by himself, no man has been so alone and apart from mankind. There is no one to speak to, no voice in his ears.