Zach Powers - First Cosmic Velocity

“What is there to say? He’s a stranger now. Do you ever stop to consider how many strangers share your name?”

“It’s not so rare a name.”

“Perhaps that’s why a title is better.”

“So you came back to discuss names and titles?”

“Honestly, Chief Designer, it wasn’t me who came back. It was Nadya. I simply followed. She wants to fly the mission. And don’t think that I didn’t try to talk her out of it.”

There was a report on the new ablative heat shield on the desk. The Chief Designer turned the pages without reading them, without even looking.

“Things might have been better if you could have convinced her.”

“That’s how your spaceships work, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“The things fly themselves, and the cosmonaut’s just a passive passenger.”

“Yes.” The Chief Designer smiled.

“It turns out that I never learned what to do when given the controls. I only end up where I’m guided.”

“You know, sometimes I envy you that.”

“No, you don’t.”

Leonid stood, knocking the chair back several inches.

“My brother told me the details of the next mission. A docking in space. Can’t you try to save him instead of the dogs?”

“His Vostok has no docking clamp. Even if we could meet it in space, the best we could do would be to bounce the two capsules against each other like billiard balls.” The Chief Designer wondered who had told the other Leonid about the mission. It must have been Mars, but that didn’t really answer the question. Who told Mars? Not that it mattered. The Chief Designer was too used to the truth slipping out.

“I know,” said Leonid.

“Then why did you ask?”

“I guess I hoped that you’d surprise me.”

“Did I?”

“Yes and no. How soon until the launch?”

“Two weeks.”

“Have I ever told you the story of the man my village was named after?”

“I know of the man, of course. He’s celebrated in Russian history, as well. But tell me.”

“Bohdan Zinoviy Mykhaylovych Khmelnytsky had crushed the Poles in battle after battle. Starting at the mouth of the Dnieper, where he had once returned to Ukrainian soil after years of slavery, he overthrew the Zaporozhian Sich, and then moved upstream, taking Dnepropetrovsk and Kremenchuk and Cherkasy all the way to Kiev. He was welcomed to the capital on Christmas Day, his procession the grandest parade in the city’s history. Streets were strung across with garlands and every window burned with candles and bands interspersed themselves with the soldiers, playing the kind of joyous songs as had not been heard in Kiev for a hundred years. Parents offered their sons to Khmelnytsky that he might raise them to be great men.

“At a gathering of Cossack nobles, such as a Cossack might be accused of nobility, Khmelnytsky claimed not just the right to rule the Zaporozhian Cossacks but the whole of Ukraine. He became in fact, if not in name, ruler of what would become our nation. From untried soldier to slave to officer to king, somehow he’d not only survived his trials but used them to shape himself into the man of the moment, a hero and a savior. His battles weren’t over, no. The Poles didn’t much care for him and attacked at every opportunity, but Khmelnytsky always prevailed. Maybe the best measure of his greatness is that his successors could not hold Ukraine together.”

“A great man, yes,” said the Chief Designer.

“Grandmother always shared his stories with us, but she left out part of his life. I wouldn’t learn of it until much later, in a book Giorgi leant me. I believe it was a book he shouldn’t have had in the first place, certainly not one that had been approved by Glavlit. It made me realize that Grandmother’s stories were just that: stories. In fact, Khmelnytsky had as many failures as successes. More than that, he had as many moments of cruelty as he did of glory.

“The worst was his hatred of the Jews. He blamed them for every ill that befell him, as if they were the disorganized armies of his subordinates or the ones issuing secret orders to the Poles. During his reign, tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. Women, men, children, the elderly. Entire villages disappeared in the wake of Cossack forces, the landscape dotted with charred buildings and mass graves, if the Cossacks even took the time to bury the dead. In some places, there were later found piles of bones, marked with the teeth of the animals that had gnawed away the flesh. And the ways the Jews were slaughtered. Dismemberment, burning, torture, even crucifixion. Any terrible death that man has ever imagined was employed against them. The lucky ones were simply stabbed. In this, Khmelnytsky was as bad as Stalin or Hitler.”

“I didn’t know that about him. The Soviet accounts are sterilized, of course.”

“I stopped revering him after I read that book. And Tsiolkovski, while he may be addled by old age, I think it merely reveals the spite that was always in his heart. A hero is a fragile thing. In the case of the cosmonauts, it took two each for every hero you created. That’s what I learned while I was away. I don’t forgive you, Chief Designer. That’s not required, though, as long as I know what I know now. There’s evil in the world, but its face isn’t yours, Chief Designer. No, it’s not yours at all.”

His face. The Chief Designer felt the scar there, an endless ache. Once, the pain had reminded him of the wound. Now, it reminded him of everything since. More than his title, more than his name, he identified himself by the ache.

WHEN THEY HAD cleaned out Giorgi’s room in the dorm, they found one whole cabinet stocked full of liquor. Domestic vodka on the lower shelves, the upper filled with imported whiskies and a few beverages no one could identify. Their labels were not printed in any of the languages the staff at Star City knew. The bottles were all unopened, waiting for a celebratory occasion for the corks to be popped. Instead, the Chief Designer had drained several bottles over the course of two weeks, always a glass or two before bed. Without the aid of drink, he lay there, mind racing through potential problems.

These were not new problems. He had a name for each. The chance that the ablative heat shield would burn too quickly or too slowly, igniting the whole capsule and exploding it in the upper atmosphere, scattering shards of metal and Nadya’s singed bones across hundreds of kilometers of Russian countryside, he shortened to The Heat Shield Problem . The fact that no one had ever attempted to dock two ships in space, that the docking mechanism had only been tested on the ground, that no launch yet had inserted Vostok into the exact planned orbit, that they called the cosmonauts pilots when they were really just passengers but now Nadya needed to be an actual pilot, that failure would mean an investigation, revealing a decade of deceit, and everyone who was involved, and quite likely many who were not, would be tried and executed for treason—the Chief Designer referred to that as The Docking Problem . There was the usual list of problems the Chief Designer dealt with for every launch, as well. He could not forget those.

Right now, though, the Chief Designer was occupied by The Hangover Problem , and to a greater degree The Dog Problem . Byelka, Khrushchev’s little rodent of a dog, had been delivered, in a private limousine, to Star City the day before. The technicians had been trying to fit the dog with a vest all morning. This was supposed to be a comfort to the dogs, as well as allowing for the placement of sensors, but apparently to Byelka the vest was the gravest travesty in the history of the universe. When they finally got it on him, he began a period of yowling and sprinting in circles that did not end until hours later. It was so intense, and the dog’s biting so vicious, that no one could get close enough to him to remove the vest that was causing the fit in the first place. Eventually, the dog wore itself out, and it collapsed in a corner, motionless. The Chief Designer worried that they had killed the dog before it even made it to the launchpad.