Zach Powers - First Cosmic Velocity

When the dog began again to show signs of life, the Chief Designer ordered it sedated. The veterinarian balked at first, but Byelka yipped anew, a sound so shrill and piercing as to drive straight through the ear canal to the brain. The veterinarian found a vein in the dog’s spindly leg and administered a dose even the Chief Designer could recognize as excessive.

“Load the little bastard,” said the Chief Designer, and two technicians put Byelka in a small cage and carried him away.

In the next room, Nadya was being fitted with her pressure suit, baggy and bright orange, topped with a helmet as wide as her torso. A cluster of tubes sprouted from the suit below her right breast, leading to what looked like a metal briefcase she held in her left hand. If anyone asked, the cosmonauts were instructed to say that the case contained life support equipment. Not an outright lie, but the case’s primary function was to store waste should a cosmonaut need to relieve herself while in the capsule. Mishin and Bushuyev buzzed around Nadya, adjusting the suit’s seals and checking zippers.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Ridiculous,” said the Chief Designer.

The top of the helmet formed a perfect white orb, a planet completely covered in clouds. He tapped his fingers lightly on the crown.

“This won’t do,” said the Chief Designer. “Someone will mistake her for an American pilot when she exits the capsule. They’ll think we’ve shot down another U-2.” He ran his finger along the white space just above the visor. “Paint something here. CCCP .”

“Who will we get to paint it?” asked Mishin or Bushuyev.

A moment of silence followed, and the Chief Designer knew they all shared the same thought.

“Whoever. No need to be perfect.”

“Just good enough,” said Nadya.

There it was, thought the Chief Designer. Nadya had created a motto for the whole Soviet space program: Just good enough . At first, it seemed to be a criticism, but what could be more Soviet? Getting by with the essentials, eschewing all else. He realized he had so far failed to live up to that motto, accepting not quite good enough as good enough. It was time to set things right. Nadya could do that. She would.

“Finish up here and we’ll head out,” said the Chief Designer. “The plane leaves in four hours.”

In fact, the plane left whenever he wanted it to. He felt, though, that setting this deadline might be the last time he had real control over the launch.

Nadya was the twin who was supposed to die. But here she was, seated inside the capsule. Voskhod, not Vostok. Not really so different, essentially the same capsule with more components crammed inside. Designed for two or three cosmonauts but there was only one left to carry. This new capsule had a video camera directed at Nadya from just below her chin, her face, framed by the white helmet of the pressure suit, filling the whole screen. The Chief Designer touched the screen with his fingers. It was not the same. For the first time, a crewed Soviet rocket would launch without Nadya in the control room.

The Chief Designer walked around the console to the periscope. This R-7 looked like a mistake, rising higher above the launchpad than the rockets used to launch Vostok. A cigarette gripped in four metal fingers. Steam rose from the base of the rocket and swirled up and away.

It seemed that the smoke from the launch of Kasha and Byelka had barely cleared before they had begun setting up Nadya’s rocket. The first launch had gone smoothly, the old routine of launching Vostok like an exercise in relaxation. They had sedated Byelka before loading him into the capsule, through the awkward docking ring around the hatch. As soon as the first rumble came from the R-7’s engines, though, the dog was alert and yipping, the noise so persistent that eventually they had to turn off the speakers in the control room. The roar of liftoff seemed quiet in comparison.

Now the dogs were in orbit, telemetry nominal. The only sound from the dogs was a repeated retching from Byelka. They had not fed him, so the Chief Designer was confident that he had not soiled the capsule too badly. Kasha sometimes let out a bark, as if only to remind everyone that she was still there. The monitors strapped to Kasha, in some cases surgically implanted, returned results from her no different than if she were napping back at Star City.

The Chief Designer returned to the control console and moved Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, away from the radio. There were actually three radios set up, one for each capsule in orbit, including Leonid’s, though this last was not turned on. Too many people in the room, lower-level engineers, had no idea at all that another capsule still circled the Earth. The Chief Designer pressed the button on the first radio’s microphone and sent his voice to the dogs, now completing their sixth orbit.

“Good girl, Kasha,” he said.

The reply came in the form of another retch from Byelka. Kasha growled, just a short sound to express her discontent.

“I’m sorry for your traveling companion, Kasha. You’ll have better company soon enough.”

A bottle of vodka passed between Mishin and Bushuyev and then to the Chief Designer. He gulped back a mouthful. He felt the burn in the empty sockets of his gums, in his veins, up and along the jagged scar on his head. He thought of himself as a rocket being fueled, that when he pressed the button, it would not be Nadya but himself, the human spaceship, lifting through the white wisps of clouds, over the Kazakh steppe’s singular unscenic-ness.

The Chief Designer took the bottle of vodka to Leonid. Leonid had been standing in the darkened corner since before the first launch, not speaking once, refusing with dismissive waves every offer to take a look through the periscope.

Leonid took the bottle and drank from it, first one swallow and then another and then another. Throwing his head back, he trickled the last drops straight into his throat.

“So much for the vodka,” said the Chief Designer.

Mishin and Bushuyev laughed, and one of them pulled a fresh bottle from under the console. “Ignatius left extras.”

They popped the cork, and the fresh bottle began its rounds. Ignatius had been there as the final preparations were made, but she left before the first launch. She even said goodbye. The Chief Designer could not recall her ever announcing her departure before. He wondered if it meant something. He would be relieved to never see her again. But without knowing if she would return, he would never be able to relax to that idea. What was worse, her actual presence or her looming one?

Leonid slouched. They had trained him to always stand tall. When he was a boy, it seemed like half of everything they said to him was some version of Straighten up . The Chief Designer wondered if this was the type of man Leonid would be if Tsiolkovski had never found him. The Chief Designer leaned on the wall next to Leonid in the darkened corner.

“When you were gone, it felt like we’d lost another cosmonaut in space,” said the Chief Designer. “I know you don’t want my thanks, but you have it. For returning and for having been here in the first place.”

Leonid gazed up at the gray ceiling, eyes focused on a point beyond it. “Do you know what I realized? While you may have given a choice to our siblings, you never gave a choice to us, those who stayed behind. You just assumed we were all right with it. I don’t mind so much being a part of this, as long as I have the option not to be. Even now, I don’t know if the choice was actually mine, but if Nadya and Kasha both fly and return, I guess that’s good enough for me. That’s as close as I’ll get to accomplishment. I didn’t choose to return. I chose to stay with them, wherever they went.”