His only hope lies with the lander.
The Sun sets. He must wait an hour in pitch blackness, with the orbit decaying by the minute. In darkness he feels his way to the storage locker below the environmental control system. His gloved hands pat the smooth dome of the bubble helmet and the bulky padding of the Krechet-94 Moonsuit. He strips off the Orlan and lets it drift away while he pulls on the Krechet. The freezing atmosphere of the cabin deadens his flesh. He slides into the suit and connects the panels. Any stretching of his frozen skin is excruciating. He fumbles the bubble helmet over his head and onto the metal collar, and locks it in place.
He floats in the darkness, sealed inside his suit, feeling warmth creep back into his body. Blood returns to the muscles and tendons. He twists and stretches, doing what little he can to loosen up. In his enclosed universe he breathes pure oxygen, but he smells his own dank odor, and the blood and goo of his sunburn.
Sunlight explodes across the horizon. The Far Side ignites into gray and brown speckles. The land rolls beneath the ship. For the first time the Sea of Moscow is lit, a dark eye in the upper left quadrant. He wants to take it as an omen. Moscow is watching him.
He dons his Moon helmet. He mounts his backpack and plugs in its cable and hoses, then attaches his tethering line. He belays the line onto a secure handhold and ties it off, leaving only a short loop.
Without power to depressurize the LOK, he must blow the hatch by hand. He turns the first safety lever, then the second. The metal creaks. He hears the locks clicking loose. He grips the handhold to the side of the hatch and releases the final lock. The cabin atmosphere blasts out into space in a single gale that boosts him up into the hatchway. The tether snaps tight but the belay holds firm. The line and his grip strain for a second, perhaps not even that long, and the wind drops. The air has gone. No force propels him outward. All is calm again.
His suit is swollen and rigid; he feels it raking against his sunburn, rupturing blisters that ooze sticky fluid, while outside the spacecraft the expelled air has sublimated in an instant and now a shower of glinting ice crystals shifts in a cloud toward the surface of the Moon.
Silence surrounds him. He sees that the surface has changed motion. It is not only sliding lengthways along the stack, but also rolling toward him. The Eastern Sea is the only feature he can recognize among the crammed overlapping rings of craters, but the Sea is rolling, it is advancing up over the equator toward the lunar north pole.
Then the land drops away from the spacecraft. Empty space begins to roll in, a black void of invisible stars. Venting the BO’s atmosphere has set Voskhodyeniye into a slow roll; no doubt it has slightly modified its orbit as well.
Yefgenii wiggles his backpack through the gap and squeezes out of the hatch into space. The tether trails behind. He maneuvers onto the handrail and now he is hanging over the northern hemisphere of the Near Side. The Sea of Cold turns under him. He is the first man to conduct an EVA in the realm of the Moon.
He reaches the boom but the motor has no power. He maneuvers by hand along the rails of the LOK fuselage toward the LK. His breath rushes. His heart drums. He must enter the LK before night falls, or else he’ll be stranded in darkness on the outside of the revolving stack.
Yefgenii has learned the most efficient method from his previous spacewalk, and secures a first position at the LK’s docking array, from which he then floats in parallel to the hull.
The LK hangs silent, cold and airless. Yefgenii secures himself on the handhold outside the hatch and begins to turn the sequence of latches to open the port. The inside of his suit is warmer than the chill air of the LOK, but his limbs remain cold, weak and stiff. No sound travels from the latches; outside the noisy living system of his suit stretches a silent endless vacuum.
When the final lock releases, the hatch remains motionless. He pulls to open it. The heavy door takes an effort to move; it retains all the mass it possessed on Earth. He swings the hatch outward and then attempts to struggle through the elliptical gap into the LK. The Kretchet Moonsuit is even bulkier than the Orlan. He twists onto his side to squeeze through the port. His backpack catches on the frame. Pain sears his sunburn. He snakes and pulls. Suffering bolts through his lower back. For the first time in days of debilitating cold, he sweats.
Inside the LK, he rests. His boots still point out of the hatch. The Sea of Rain floats up into the framed segment of sky, then the Carpathians lift off the soles of his boots, then Copernicus. He is approaching the terminator.
Yefgenii pushes himself away from the hatch. His tether trails out into space, running back to the LOK, holding him back. He maneuvers to the control panel and activates the master switch. The LK draws power from its batteries. The cabin lights blink on. Gauge needles quiver, digital displays glow. He disconnects the tether, shuts the hatch and pressurizes the LK.
His suit softens and he removes his outer helmet, bubble helmet and space gloves. Taking a position at the pilot’s station, his priority is to arrest the rolling of the stack caused by blowing the LOK hatch. Flying Voskhodyeniye from the LK has never been simulated. The lander’s computer is coming online but it isn’t configured to the dynamics of the entire stack. He must work by trial and error.
Yefgenii fires the thrusters to oppose the roll. The roll slows but the stack yaws, swinging the LK — the bow of the stack — toward the Moon, and the stern — the LOK and power module — out into space. In the viewports of the lander the lunar surface sweeps into sight, and then the terminator, and then the spacecraft and the lone cosmonaut are in darkness, tumbling in roll and yaw, divergent on two axes, in a failing orbit less than 100 kilometres above the pitiless surface of the Moon.
FIVE DAYS since Mission Control lost contact with Voskhodyeniye, the widow will have accepted his death. She’ll be grieving. She’ll have sat the children in the living room of the apartment and said she has something very sad to tell them. She explains that their father has gone to a secret place and they will never see him again. The boy stares back at her with big blue eyes. “Where has he gone?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Is he dead?” asks the girl.
The widow nods. “Yes,” she says. “He is dead,” she says.
Already they are controlling their feelings. The boy is turning tough; he will become a man like his father who erects barriers to emotion. The girl is earnest; she will become more so, more austere. Yefgenii longs to burst into the apartment in their moment of grief and gather them all into his arms and give them the news that he’s alive and that he loves them and, in holding them and murmuring to them, reverse the emotional damage wrought by his obsessive pursuit of the perfect mission.
In the flight plan, he would make the landing and then return to orbit for rendezvous with the LOK. But he is losing his battle with the LK’s controls. He cannot correct Voskhodyeniye’s trajectory, so the LOK will not maintain orbit. It will crash down onto the surface of the Moon. It will not be here when the lander returns from the surface, and the lander itself cannot carry him home. It is too fragile to enter the atmosphere. The flight plan is no longer achievable. It has driven him through the past few days, the plan, always the plan. This thing has been the shape of his life, or his death, and even that has gone. Now it must either be the landing or the return home; it cannot be both.
Major Yefgenii Yeremin undocks the lander. He activates the controls of the Kontakt docking system to effect release of the LOK’s male probe from the LK’s female grid. He feels a bump as the probe rears away from the grid. Through the upper viewport he gazes at the LOK as it begins a slow drifting recession. The dark vessel turns as it falls behind. The two ships progress into night. Then the LOK — lifeless, powerless, lightless — vanishes.