Nadya had followed him outside, but now wandered on her own toward the far end of the quadrangle. Whenever she came to one of the paved paths, she paused before it, looking down as if at a creek, and then jumped across. Far as she could jump, certainly farther than Leonid, she could not quite make it to the other side. Perhaps if she had taken a running start, but she never seemed bothered by coming up short. Leonid could not understand the rules of her game, assuming there were rules at all.
The dry grass crackled behind him. Ignatius entered his peripheral vision, head craned up at the sky, hands thrust in the pockets of her leather jacket. She stopped at Leonid’s side.
“It’s too hot for this,” she said.
“Take it off.”
“Your proposition lacks subtlety.”
“You never seemed concerned with propriety.”
Ignatius lifted her arms without removing her hands from the pockets, spreading the jacket like the wings of a crow, the fur collar a tuft of feathers. She turned one of the wings to her face and inspected the faded red lining.
“It’s a kind of uniform, yes?” she said. “It suits what I do.”
“Harassing me?”
“I was speaking of my job. Harassing you is a hobby.”
Nadya leapt over the last path, far down the quadrangle. She was shrunk by the distance, just a blur of motion against the trees. She stood there, glancing around, as if she did not know what to do now that the task of leaping paths was complete.
“She’s like a child sometimes,” said Ignatius.
“It was never intended that she become an adult.”
“Children are at once much easier and much more difficult to control.”
“What, we’re children to you? And to the Chief Designer?”
“Yes, but to each of us in our own way. The Chief Designer loves you all like flesh and blood. I, on the other hand, am just a nanny. Yes, I may care for you, but I don’t care for you enough to take care of you without getting paid.”
“A rather bourgeois sentiment coming from an instrument of the Party.”
“Payment isn’t always in the form of money.”
“What then?”
“The Chief Designer works for pride. Mars out of regret. Nadya because she knows nothing else. And you? You work for duty. Duty to your brother, to your grandmother, to Tsiolkovski, maybe even to the Chief Designer.”
“Duty? Half of those you listed are dead, one abandoned us long ago, and the last is responsible for the death of the first. I’m the one who is owed, not the other way around.”
“Kasha, then.”
Leonid looked at her. Her lips turned up in the faintest of smiles, eyes narrowed, an expression between mirth and stern seriousness. It was the look she always used to silence him, as if she knew more than him and always would. Nanny, indeed.
Leonid waved his hand, brushing her expression aside. Today it would not work.
“It doesn’t seem that she has much longer to be with us,” he said. “If duty is what drives me, then I’m soon to be without motivation of any sort.”
He turned back to the dormitory and took a step in that direction. Ignatius’s hand darted from her pocket and gripped him by the sleeve. Still holding him, she orbited to his front, inches from his face. All the mirth had drained from her expression.
“Whatever you’re thinking, know one thing: If the Chief Designer is exposed, it’s not just him that will suffer. It’s you and Nadya, Mars, Yuri, Valentina. Mishin and Bushuyev. Everyone in the whole damn program.” She gestured to several figures walking down the path toward the centrifuge. “It’ll be like Stalin all over again, except directed specifically against the only people you know.”
“Exposed for what?” asked Leonid. His mind raced back over their conversation. He had said too much, admitting the deepest secret of the space program to Ignatius. He had been upset, and she disarmed him with feigned kindness, tricked him into confiding in her. She hadn’t even needed to drug him like the Americans in London. Ignatius had expressed no surprise, though. Even before Leonid had admitted anything, she mentioned his brother. She knew. She had known all along. A wash of panic swept through his stomach.
She smiled again. “Leonid. I’m not an idiot. Just as you know that my job entails more than Glavlit, more than writing articles for newspapers, so, too, I know that there’s more to the space program than the public, even Khrushchev, will ever suspect.”
“What will you do about it?”
“The same as I’ve always done. Ensure that the articles I write celebrate Soviet glory. I’m not a threat to you. The Chief Designer is scared of me, and I suppose he should be. But it’s in my best interest that he succeed because it’s in the best interest of the Party.”
“How long have you known?”
“There was no specific day, but one can’t remain near something without coming to understand the inner workings.” She released his arm.
Nadya, still distant, retraced her path, walking backward, like a film played in reverse. She took a short, comical hop at one of the paths. Stumbling back, she seemed about to fall, but quickly righted herself. She shuffled backward through the dry grass.
“What about her?” asked Leonid. “Do you understand Nadya? I’ve spent more time with her than anyone but would never claim to know what goes on inside her head.”
“She’s an exception. I’ve found that the best things are always exceptions.”
“And me?”
“You, Leonid, are the rising of the sun. The chiming of a clock. The churning tides.”
“Predictable?”
“But who’s complaining?”
Nadya hopped backward again.
THE CENTRIFUGE SWUNG into its first loping revolution. The metal bulb that held Giorgi capped the end of a tapering tube, several meters across even at its narrow end, the fat end secured to a great metal cylinder at the axis. The whole contraption had been painted the same sickly green they used for rockets. The Chief Designer never knew where that paint had come from, or who had chosen it. One day he’d walked to the assembly facility, and found the first R-7 already painted. And then it turned up coating equipment at Star City. The centrifuge even looked a little like a rocket lain on its side. Grinding gears in the rectangular base pinched out a low whine. The pitch lifted and faded and then went silent, replaced with a toneless rush of air.
The Chief Designer watched from the observation room, separated by a pane of glass that shuddered when the centrifuge’s capsule hurled by. He flinched a little each time, expecting the glass to shatter. The worry was not unfounded. During the centrifuge’s first test, the original window had burst apart, propelling a shard all the way through the operator’s wrist. The new glass, the Chief Designer had been guaranteed, would not shatter even under the force of a bullet.
Mishin and Bushuyev sat at the console today, one of them incrementally twisting the black knob that controlled the speed of the spin and the other monitoring Giorgi’s vital signs, which were spit out on several strips of paper, squiggled lines that meant near nothing to the Chief Designer. A mechanical beep marked each beat of Giorgi’s heart. The beat stayed constant even as the g-forces reached what must have been an uncomfortable level. The metal of the centrifuge groaned, as if to make up for Giorgi’s silence.