When the second stopwatch indicates he’s halfway round this revolution, he identifies the crater Tsiolkovsky directly below, and with the sextant measures its apparent diameter. This measurement he hopes will determine the high point of Voskhodyeniye’s orbit, the apocynthion.
An hour of sunlight illuminates Yefgenii’s toil, and then lunar night once again engulfs the spacecraft. He must stop, and cannot help contemplating his situation. If his orbital velocity is too slow, Voskhodyeniye will soon crash to the surface.
When day breaks again, he continues through his calculations: Voskhodyeniye is travelling an acceptable orbit, moving at close to the predicted velocity. His present situation appears stable. He must stop work. He must rest and take sustenance.
He consumes his food allowance. The surviving fuel cell has produced a pittance of water. Little frost is forming on the interior of the cabin now. What water vapor remains in the cabin atmosphere comes from his own breath. He removes his gloves and squeezes out of the spacesuit. The cold stings his flesh. He hurries, he shivers. He seals off and disconnects the filling pipe of his waste collection bag and removes the bag from his suit. A globule of straw-coloured fluid floats off the tip of the bag’s hose. He puts the hose of the waste collection bag in his mouth and opens the seal. He sucks out the liquid that’s a mixture of his urine and sweat. It amounts to only a couple of hundred millilitres. He chases the globule that escaped from the tube. It wobbles and shimmers. Spectra flash off streaks of grease. The surface is already frosting. He closes his mouth over the globule, taking it in one gulp.
After reinstating the waste collection bag, he struggles back into the suit. The material stretches but his muscles and tendons don’t. He contorts into it. The sunburn on his flank tears. He screams, tears come to his eyes, and he finds a way to drink those too.
By now the spacecraft is travelling through darkness again. When it emerges, he huddles in the sunlight. The Far Side rolls below. The Moon is small and the ship is close. He gains a sense of speed in contrast to the stately promenade of Earth orbit.
The Eastern Sea slides under the lunar equator. Earth rises again. He sets himself at the porthole with the telescope trained down on the surface. By eye he tracks the appearance of the highlands of the Ocean of Storms’ western coastline dominated by the crater Hevelius, 100 kilometres across. Without an atmosphere to burn them up, meteorites have struck the surface intact and gouged out great lumps of rock and dust.
He sees the land flatten. Through the eyepiece of the telescope he surveys the landing site. The lava bed ripples between Reiner and Marius to the northeast. No large craters or cliffs ruin the picture. Eastward streaks of ejecta begin to appear, diverging from their point of origin, Kepler. This closer survey supports the objective of setting down somewhere in a zone measuring about 200 kilometres by 300. No observable feature suggests the landing site is unsuitable.
Voskhodyeniye leaves the Sun behind, and the dazzling yellow disc begins to slide behind the lunar horizon. The shadow is visible ahead, crossing the Sea of Islands east of the crater Copernicus. The illuminated portion of the Near Side is continuing to dwindle. The Ocean of Storms will remain sunlit for a further three days; in six days there’ll be a new Moon, when the satellite swings between the Earth and the Sun and the entire Near Side falls into darkness. At present, the Sun angle is optimal for the landing, being oblique to the Ocean of Storms so that craters and hills are thrown into relief, rather than being blasted into a flat panorama that gives an observer no sense of perspective.
Yefgenii is desperate for rest. His head aches with nausea, hunger and dehydration. His body aches from cold. His sunburn is bleeding and sore, he can feel the stinking dressing getting damper. He unfolds the mesh hammock and straps himself in. Darkness swallows Voskhodyeniye and, moments later, sleep its occupant.
HE SQUINTS IN THE SUNLIGHT. Ears of corn wave in the breeze. The crop is taller than him. He is running. A narrow path cuts through the cornfield, bordered by the tall stalks that catch on his elbows and spring back as he goes by. He is laughing. Though someone’s chasing him, he isn’t frightened, because she is laughing too. He feels her gentle hands hook him under the arms and swing him up into the air, so high he is whirling above the ears of corn. Together they are laughing and spinning. He gazes into her face but the sunlight bursts round the curls of her hair, burning out his vision of her. He squints into the glare, searching for her face, the woman laughing and swinging him, and he is laughing too, and so little, but he can’t see her because he is dazzled by the Sun.
Voskhodyeniye is blazing with light. He wakes, blinking at the glare bouncing off the metal plates of the BO. He unstraps himself and floats off the mesh hammock. The Ocean of Storms drifts below. He glimpses the triangle of craters, Marius, Reiner, and Kepler, and they appear different to him. He wonders if the orbit has slipped somehow. He glances at his chronometer. He’s slept for six hours, making three revs of the Moon since he last surveyed the landing site.
He feels sick and starved. Part of him craves a return to the hammock and straps, so he can huddle in his suit for days as if taking to his bed to break a fever.
The sextant is angled as it was for his previous determination of the orbit’s pericynthion. The distinguishing features of the landing site are passing below. He has time enough only for a single measurement, so he chooses the angular separation between Reiner and Kepler: this being the largest angle, it will provide the most accurate comparison. He looks back over his handwritten notes and sees his suspicion confirmed. The angular separation has increased. The orbit is decaying. Voskhodyeniye is losing altitude and at some point yet to be determined will plummet down to the surface of the Moon.
He’s failed to achieve the orbit demanded by the flight plan. The error is grievous. Most likely his navigation has been imprecise, and he’s misjudged the course corrections and the lunar orbit insertion burn. He rues his arrogance, for persisting with the original mission when the more achievable option was always to keep on the free-return trajectory to Earth.
Now he straps himself into the pilot’s seat. He intends to fire the Block D engine for an arbitrary period of ten seconds in order to accelerate into a less unstable orbit. That at least will buy sufficient time to plan and execute trans-Earth injection with requisite precision, trans-Earth injection being the burn that will hurl him home.
First he needs to swing the spacecraft round. The engine stands at the leading edge of the stack, in combination with the LK.
The thrusters fail. He is getting no power indications from any of the LOK’s systems. He checks the circuit breakers and fuel cells. The LOK is dead. Out of sheer desperation he attempts to fire the thrusters once more, but the propellant doesn’t ignite. The electronic connections between the LOK’s command power grid and the ship’s thrusters have drained.
Maybe from the LK he can still fire the Block D, but he must also turn the ship round, or else the sole effect of ignition will be to decelerate Voskhodyeniye and crash it into the Moon. He attempts to power up the LK from the LOK. He throws the switches to open the circuits to the LK but no power lights blink on. Both modules appear lifeless, but the LK may still be in its dormant state; its batteries may yet drive its guidance systems and spark its engines, and its engines are capable of powering the entire stack out of lunar orbit and onto the trajectory home.