Zach Powers - First Cosmic Velocity

The old part of the factory appeared first through the trees, tall windows surrounding the whole structure, giving off warped, wavy reflections. The walls were crested with a thin outcropping of brick, a pathetic attempt at decoration. His old office was in the narrow turret on the near corner, concrete and glass stretching high above the complex like the control tower back at the airport. It was still his office, he supposed, but he did not recall the last time he had sat at the desk. He wondered if reports piled up there like they did at Star City. He would have to check.

Here the road intersected the tracks, the car bouncing across the rails, nearly launching the Chief Designer’s head into the ceiling. Thump thump. A crane car, splotched with red rust like patches of inflamed skin, idled on the tracks. A decade ago, he had requisitioned the funds to build a shelter for the crane, but the request had been denied. At least a tarpaulin would have helped, but he had forgotten about the crane until right now. He knew he would forget about it again as soon as he entered the factory.

His driver parked the car in a weedy patch of dirt by the door to the offices. It was supposed to be the best parking space, the shortest walk in winter from car to front door, but this entrance was the farthest from the factory proper, and a maze of hallways lay between it and any of the destinations the Chief Designer might actually seek out. He exited the car and walked toward the other door, the one that opened directly onto the factory floor, some hundred meters away. He was only halfway there when the rumble started. He felt it first through his feet and then the tall windows rattled in their old frames. He stepped away from the wall, worried that at any moment one of the panes might shake loose. Ripples of heat rose above the factory roof, quivering the trees and clouds beyond. The twin smokestacks of the forge seemed to move as if they were made of the same smoke that burped out of the top of them.

He was late. The heat shield test had already begun. He hurried, almost trotting, trusting his feet even though the ground seemed at any moment ready to shake from under him. The heat hit even before he rounded the building. Then the glow, still half a kilometer away, emerged like a second sun, but too close, rising from within the earth instead of far over the horizon. The Chief Designer squinted against the blaze. One of his RD-107 engines had been mounted horizontally to a reinforced concrete slab, the open end of the nozzle aimed directly at a working mock-up of Voskhod.

It was this engine that had destroyed the Chief Designer’s hopes time and again. There had been so many tests that he could identify the exact moment the heat shield would fail by the particular color its surface blazed, as it went from red to orange to cream, and just before it reached white the whole thing would erupt, liquid metal spraying from the structure underneath, solidifying into abstract hunks that still marred the concrete slab like sculpture.

Shielding his eyes, the Chief Designer fumbled along the wall until he found the door to the control room, little more than a sheet metal hut. The technicians, eyes glued to dials and readouts, did not greet him. One console in the corner let out a repetitive beep, like a heart monitor. A teacup tittered on a saucer. The cup had Nadya’s face printed on it.

The Chief Designer retrieved a mask from beside the slitted observation window. The mask was patterned after the kind used by welders, but without the lower half, just a glass visor covered with several layers of BoPET, which allowed one to look directly into the flame of the engine, to pick out details that otherwise would have been lost in the blaze. Through the visor, the thrust of the engine always reminded the Chief Designer of Amsel Falls. He and several other engineers had managed to visit the waterfall on their way home from Germany after the war, diverting their convoy, trucks full of V-2 rocket parts and more than a few German scientists, far to the south. It was the only time the Chief Designer had ever left the soil of the Soviet Union. He had wanted something to remember from the trip other than the insides of German bunkers. He could have been executed for that excursion, for risking the precious spoils of war on a personal vacation. But by that point, the Chief Designer was, if not numbed to, at least familiar with the looming threat of execution.

More than just the sight of the falls, though, the engine reminded him of the sound of cascading water. Amsel Falls had struck him then as the loudest thing he had ever heard. The power of it humbled him. Now, the flames of the engine affected him the same way. He sometimes thought he was too proud a man for his own business. He wanted control, and every test, every launch, every single day reminded him that he had none.

The heat shield burned at what seemed like a slow pace, concentric rings of bright flame starting from center and burning the surface layer outward, like sheets of paper flaring away one after the other. The color went from orange to yellow to cream. The rings of flame came faster. This was where heat always won. This was the moment when Nadya, the one who died, would have felt the first shudder of a problem as the capsule reentered the atmosphere. She would have had just enough time to wonder about it before the capsule burst apart, disintegrating to nothing.

The Chief Designer waited for it. He had seen it so often that he did not even hold his breath in hope anymore. But the color endured, creamy instead of virgin white, and the pace of the flames steadied on the surface of the shield. He looked at the clock, counting upward, struggling to make out the numbers through the visor. When he read them, he did not believe. He pulled the mask off to make sure he was reading correctly. He mouthed along with the rising seconds as they ticked off the clock.

It worked. The General Designer’s heat shield worked. The Chief Designer forgot he had the mask in his hands and dropped it. The sound of the metal on the concrete floor could barely be heard above the engine. He gripped the shoulder of the technician seated nearest him. The technician started, as if the touch were an explosion at the test site.

“It works,” said the Chief Designer.

The technician shook her head, unable to hear him.

He leaned close to her ear and shouted, “It works!”

The technician nodded once, as if this had been the expected result, as if it had not been preceded by a decade of failures. But this technician was young. For all the Chief Designer knew, it was the first test she had been a part of. They cycled new people onto the heat shield project on a monthly basis, so none of them would have the chance to learn the secret that the heat shield had never actually functioned. But now it did. Now they could launch Giorgi and bring him home…

Giorgi. No, not Giorgi. It was Nadya’s turn again. That was good, was it not? She would have the chance she should have had years ago. The Chief Designer had always secreted the guilty thought that this Nadya, the one trained in spaceflight, would have somehow succeeded where her sister failed. He knew it was not true. He felt ashamed every time he thought it. But now she could prove the point. She could triumph where all else had been lost.

The thought struck him then, surprising in that it had never occurred to him before: No one had ever asked Nadya or any of the cosmonauts what they thought of the whole grand endeavor. The Chief Designer had dreamed so hard of space since he read Tsiolkovski’s stories as a young man that he could not believe someone might not share the dream. But the twins were conscripts, not volunteers. Their dreams had never been taken into consideration.

The engine cut off. There, where the flames had been, the mock-up of Voskhod remained.