Zach Powers - First Cosmic Velocity

A figure shifted in the corner, amid shadows not so dark that they should have been able to conceal someone. The scent of cheap cigarette smoke wafted from the corner, sullying the air. Even though he did not believe in such things, the Chief Designer at first suspected a ghost. Certainly he was a person worth haunting.

“Here’s to another successful launch, Chief Designer.”

The woman emerged into the lit part of the room as if coalescing from the dark. She was part smiling face, the rest leather jacket, several sizes too big. The high fur collar rimmed her neck. Her hair was cut in a Western style, her makeup like something an actor might wear to portray a pharaoh. She dropped a cigarette, snuffing it out with her heel. The Chief Designer sighed. It was Ignatius, a writer for Glavlit, responsible for crafting every word written about the space program. She was the one who had decided to never use his name.

Two glasses of vodka balanced on the palm of her extended left hand. The Chief Designer took one and accepted her toast. The vodka was pure, obviously filtered many times, better than the swill he and the other engineers had been sharing earlier. He gulped it down. If he believed in such things, it would have felt a little like sealing a deal with the devil.

“Are you here for an interview?” he asked.

She laughed. Not once had she interviewed him, though many, many times she had attributed to him words he never spoke. The nameless Chief Designer of the newspapers orated grand statements of Soviet glory. Seldom did he speak about outer space.

“I simply wished to see the launch,” she said.

“The bunker doesn’t offer the best view.”

“Everyone, even you it seems, thinks only of the ignition of the engines. You wouldn’t need a roomful of people if it were as simple as that.”

“Hardly simple. One day you should count the parts of the R-7.”

“I’m not sure that I’m qualified to tell where one part ends and the next begins. At what division is a part of a part a thing itself?”

“Ask Mishin. Or Bushuyev.”

Ignatius set her glass, still mostly full, on the launch console. The Chief Designer moved it to the communications console, something cheaper to replace should the vodka spill.

“Mars seems sad,” said Ignatius.

“He’s a melancholy sort.”

“Only after a launch, which one might consider strange.”

“Are you here to write about us or psychoanalyze us?”

“I’m here to write about the successes of the Soviet system. As such, I have a vested interest in the continuation of those successes.”

“Are you implying something?”

“Your time in the gulag has made you suspicious.”

“Your presence makes me suspicious.” The Chief Designer turned and faced the wall as if looking through it to the launchpad.

“Chief Designer,” said Ignatius, “we want the same thing. We both want glory.”

“I don’t want glory.”

“You want the moon. What’s more glorious than that?”

“Silence, perhaps.”

Ignatius snatched her glass, splashing some of the vodka though not enough to do damage, and drank the rest in a single gulp. She held the glass up to the Chief Designer’s face. She spun and hurled the glass at the wall, exploding it into a starfield of shards. The pop of the impact was followed by the delicate percussion of the fall.

“Glory is a fragile thing, Chief Designer. You may fool the Presidium, the military, even Khrushchev himself, but you don’t fool me. What would I find, for instance, if I visited the bunker up the road?”

“A broom, perhaps, to clean this up.”

“When I come to clean, it will be with more than just a broom.”

“A threat?”

“I want only what you want, except I don’t care who accomplishes it. The General Designer, perhaps.”

“The General Designer is an ass.”

“If we were to catalog offenses, I think yours would be more numerous.” She held up her hand, fingers spread. “I count five. Four and a half, at least.”

The Chief Designer stared at her. Only a few knew the truth. The twins. Mishin and Bushuyev. Tsiolkovski, of course, though he had vanished years ago. The scar on the Chief Designer’s head throbbed.

“Don’t get me wrong, Chief Designer. I have no desire to expose you. In fact, I’m the only person really on your side.”

“I didn’t ask for an ally.”

She inspected her palm, her fingers still splayed. “So many of us don’t ask for the things we receive. Someone more spiritual might call it fate.”

Ignatius brushed bits of the broken glass into the corner with the toe of her boot. She opened the steel door. Its massive hinges groaned. Daylight peeked through, and a gust of wind carried in a cloud of yellow dust.

She said, “Hurry, or you’ll miss your flight. See you in Moscow.”

The plane would wait, though. That was one thing, at least, over which the Chief Designer retained a modicum of control.

THE LATCH CLICKED, and the door creeped open.

Leonid had been watching through the window as the motorcade approached from the control bunker and drove past. A fine grit of dirt plumed behind the cars. The service vehicles came next, technicians returning from the pad. A few people strolled alongside the road to personal vehicles parked at the edge of the launch complex. Within a few hours, no one would be near Leonid for kilometers around. He reminded himself that his brother was even more remote.

When the door opened just wide enough, Nadya slipped sideways into the bunker. She wore the gray suit all cosmonauts were forced to wear on launch day, flat and featureless except for the black trim along the mandarin collar, designed to look futuristic but accomplishing monastic instead. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, something she only did for public appearances, and only then when told to do so. There must have been a photo shoot following the launch. There had been ten thousand photos for every rocket.

“Where’s the Chief Designer?” asked Leonid.

“He left.”

“How’d you get the key?”

“I took it from his pocket. He’s always so distracted before a launch.” She looked at a corner of the room while she talked. Unlike the other earthbound twins, she had never been trained in social graces such as eye contact.

The door closed behind her, and the lock clicked. There was no keyhole on the inside. Four folded cots leaned against the wall. Nadya took one and set it up beside Leonid’s. She sat down, face hung toward the floor. The concrete looked like the moon, pocked and ashen.

“You won’t return to Star City?” asked Leonid.

“I always end up there eventually.”

She reached across the gap between cots and pulled Leonid’s hand to her lap, massaging the faint scar on his forearm with her thumb. It was the same gesture her sister, the other Nadya, used to make after they first arrived in Star City, when the twins, still children, were split up and homesickness rose in waves each evening. That Nadya would go from bunk to bunk, soothing weeping to silence, only returning to her own bed after all the other children slept. Leonid’s scar had been darker then.

There was no confusing that Nadya for this one, who was so much colder and more distant. Maybe this Nadya had once been the same as her sister, but the Chief Designer trained that out of her. For every hour Leonid had spent learning manners from Mishin and Bushuyev, and more recently with Ignatius, for every speech he was required to give to his reflection in a mirror, he knew the space-bound twins had spent just as much time inside simulators and centrifuges. That was how Nadya had lived her whole life up until the launch. She was merely meant to be another mechanical component of Vostok. A switch to flip the other switches.